IT forms only small part of information lifecycle management

By Paul Mullon for Metrofile
Johannesburg, 08 Nov 2006

Information lifecycle management deserves to be set free of the constraints of information technology, says Paul Mullon, information governance executive at Metrofile.

IT has come to be woven up into the fabric of almost every organisation in the world. As a department, it punches way above its weight in business today, sometimes with negative consequences. Typically, this is where IT is assigned line responsibility for functions and duties outside of its scope.

This happens consistently in organisations, where management often delegates ownership of critical aspects of the business to IT. As an example, one is enterprise architecture, which has very little to do with IT; and another is information lifecycle management, or ILM, which touches on IT but is inherently far broader than IT and should not be owned by it.

The moment management delegates ownership of ILM to IT, it has effectively surrendered ownership of a critical business function and unfairly and incorrectly pigeonholed a discipline whose roots predate IT as we know it by many centuries.

Here's the reason: the stuff that's to be found in IT systems represents only the digital content of organisations. It is the aspect which lent itself to automation, to daily, weekly, monthly updates against databases.

It can reside in vast mainframe, host-centric and client/server systems, its logic executed in application servers and its data stored in vast centralised database servers.

But this is a mere fraction of the information the average organisation has to deal with. Most organisations concern themselves with data in its current iteration, rendered to binary format: strings of hexadecimal 1 and 0.

Yet more corporate records are held outside of these digital systems than are held in them, by a significant percentage. IT has and can never have a purview of information held in systems and structures way beyond the reach of servers and databases.

One day the message will get through. ILM is not an IT problem, and IT alone isn't the solution. As one example, consider the case of legal discovery, where the courts will look to all the information an organisation holds, rather than just the information managed by IT.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) says: "Information lifecycle management is comprised of the policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived through its final disposition. Information is aligned with business processes through management policies and service levels associated with applications, metadata, information, and data."

Note, again, the emphasis on IT and associated technical infrastructure and resources skew the bias in favour of IT, and away from business, which is where it should be.

Part of the reason IT lays claim to ILM is that vendors are bidding for the high ground so as to sell more kit. Enter the words "Information lifecycle management" in Google, and the first batch of results returned will all be related to IT vendors: EMC, ComputerWorld, StorageTek, Netapp and more.

Wikipedia gets it almost right: "Information Lifecycle Management (sometimes abbreviated ILM) is the practice of applying certain policies to the effective management of information throughout its useful life. This practice has been used by Records and Information Management (RIM) Professionals for over three decades and had its basis in the management of information in paper or other physical forms (microfilm, negatives, photographs, audio or video recordings and other assets)."

ILM is, in fact, the discipline of managing all records in an organisation through five phases:

* Creation and receipt
* Distribution
* Use
* Maintenance
* Disposal

They must be managed in the appropriate fashion, with the highest degree of efficiency, and at a cost that is correct for the record at each point in its lifecycle.

These records include vast warehouses full of paper, stored for periods ranging from three years to indefinite; microfilm and microfiche; e-mail; computer output to laser disc; and IT-based records.

So, next time you hear an IT pundit holding forth about ILM, do bear in mind that he's talking about only a small portion of the actual discipline; and typically, that's the part which makes him money.

Metrofile

Metrofile, an Empowerdex BBB-rated empowerment company, is the South African market leader in the management of business documents, and is committed to help customers reduce costs and improve productivity in processes that are centred on documents and corporate records.

All companies have a combination of paper and electronic documents, and are forced by law and customer requirements to secure the availability of the documents for the duration of their lifecycle. For most organisations, the volume of documents is growing at an exponential rate, and is becoming increasingly difficult to manage.

Metrofile is uniquely positioned to provide consulting and implementation of full lifecycle paper and electronic records management solutions from storage and conversion through to destruction.

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