What’s your Corporate IQ?
Beating Information Overload
There’s a new battleground to be fought in the enterprise. Our businesses have become ‘hoarders’ of information and there’s a compelling need for a massive clean-up.
We’ve spent much of the last two decades building IT infrastructure and systems to grow. During that time, we’ve gathered up volumes of information about our businesses and stored it away in what we thought was a safe place. And store it we have. The average enterprise has seen a 10x increase in the size of its information repositories in the last decade … terabyte upon terabytes of databases, files, email, SharePoint and other data farms that are growing at a rate of 60% per year.
But, rather than creating another breakthrough in how IT solutions can leverage new levels of productivity for knowledge workers and decision makers, the volumes of data have become an albatross around the collective necks of corporate officers. The costs and risks of litigation, compliance and corporate governance are rising exponentially. The question now resonating around executive offices is more basic:
What in any of these data repositories is ‘relevant’ and why are we keeping it?
The dirty little secret inside our four walls is that in most cases, we don’t know! Because the growth has been so rapid, the typical defense that organizations took whenever a request for new information came in was either to outsource it (and create a new separate storage area) or expand internal storage and add a duplicate subset. Keeping track of the relationships and reality of information is something most IT Information Managers would rather just close their eyes and ignore than confront. Unfortunately, with the dawn of the ‘regulated enterprise’, that type of wishful thinking is no longer possible.
It’s time to raise the collective intelligence of our enterprise. The next decade will create a range of solutions to allow CIO’s to attack this problem at its core, solutions that:
- Understand the map of your data taxonomies completely, including the semantic relationships between data that hides information which can help (or harm) the business.
- More efficiently access and store information, organized to serve the needs of the business vs. aggregated for the benefit of storage suppliers.
- Provide smart applications that can more easily discover relevant data during litigation, create governance policies, and respond automatically to new compliance initiatives.
At StoredIQ, it’s our intention to lead both the conversation and the development of reliable solutions for these problems. As the new CEO of the company, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to lead this company forward through all the innovations, partnerships and deployments that will make this work.
Let’s start the dialogue. Your comments are welcome. You can also reach me directly at pmyers@storediq.com.
Tags: compliance, e-discovery, eDiscovery, electronic discovery, information governance, information management, information relevance, legal discovery, risk management
