Is It Potentially Relevant?

Remember, no matter what Daisies you WANT to chuck, you can’t take ANY action unless you make sure the information is not even potentially relevant and/or needed for threatened, imminent or active lawsuits, investigations or audits. Take for example the Hackergate investigation. That’s the case of News Corp. journalists hacking into the voice mails of people in the news to learn insights into their lives so they could report on the information. Lots of folks are under scrutiny (and they have already shut down the offending newspaper in England) because of the scandal. However, as reported in the Wall Street journal on December 12, 2011 in an article entitled ‘Hacking Investigation Questions Who Erased Voice Mails’, the investigation is focusing on the deletion of the certain voice mail messages as such action might point to the guilty party.

Randy Kahn says . . .

Press Release: Autonomy Unveils Meaning-Based Policy Control Solution for Governance and Compliance

"Businesses need a comprehensive tool to automatically and consistently administer policies and determine risk," said Randolph Kahn, founder of Kahn Consulting and author of "Information Nation". "Autonomy is taking a unique approach to implementing and managing policies to govern the lifecycle of information."

Read the full Press Release here.

Records Memorialize

NY Times reports that an “independent investigative committee found that the governor of Saga prefecture told the operator, Kyushu Electric Power, to send e-mails supporting the restart of two reactors at the company’s Genkai Nuclear Power Station. The company has already admitted to ordering employees to pose as regular citizens by sending e-mails during an online town hall-style meeting in June over whether to allow the restart of the reactors.”

Records memorialize and can hurt. Time for some business ethics, risk management and email training. Nice job Japan - Allow a disaster to happen and add insult upon injury until you have no credibility. Brilliant.

Your Business Needs to Rightsize

A Dozen Really Good Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Rightsize its Information Footprint

“Rightsizing Your Information Footprint” is my made-up term for turning your Information Parking Lots into a Goldie Locks and the Three Bears amount of information — not too much, not too little, but just the right amount. There is too much digital content with more created continuously. We need to clean up the past in a defensible way. While the daisies are beautiful at the beginning of their life, they lose their appeal as they decay. The same is generally true for information. Businesses also need a better path forward so that content comes into being because the business needs it, and all records are better managed.

Too much stuff, you fail to be business efficient and you get your clock cleaned when litigation strikes.
Too little information, you can’t run your business and you fail to comply with record keeping requirements, among other things.

So here are 12 remarkably compelling reasons to Rightsize, right now:

1. Information is growing at such a rapid rate that costs related to storing, finding, using, migrating, extracting, preserving information are too high
2. Knowing what information exists and where it is parked to be able to efficiently run your business is too complex
3. Technology has failed to find a good way to manage content with little impact to employee productivity (but Kahn is working on auto-classification to help)
4. Employees get too much content to be able to properly manage it
5. Content has sat for years in old Information Parking Lots and it is a decaying asset (Working on my new book called Chucking Daisies to help companies deal with this precise issue)
6. Companies spend too much time looking through way too much irrelevant stuff to respond to litigation, audits and investigations
7. Companies have out of date records used against them in litigation, which could have been disposed earlier
8. Systems are breaking down or no longer work as efficiently as they should, due to information volume burden
9. Data parking lots are being ill-managed and that failure is causing other failures, not the least of which is failing to harness needed information to be “faster, better and cheaper.”
10. Going Green. No list is complete until it has a bit of Green. Technology is using all kinds of energy and by cutting your energy, emission and every other relevant footprint, you are greener, you look better to the outside world and maybe the marketers have something Green to say about the effort
11. Information finds itself on unsanctioned data Parking Lots, when sanctioned ones fill up, making life more challenging
12. Along with volume, growth has been the creator of many new Information Parking Lots (Smart phones, Cloud, Twitter, Blogs, etc.) which makes management that much more challenging

Rightsizing will never be as easy as it is right now as information Parking Lots grow and grow. Clean house of digital data junk. Develop a thoughtful plan for future information retention. Rightsize now because it’s good business.

Too much data is bad

The June 30, 2011, The Economist covers a story about “Too Much Information” and “How to cope with data overload.” At a minimum that means the folks across the pond are also realizing at some point too much data is a bad thing. The business world is at the place where we are over run with digital stuff and it is now taking away a competitive advantage, negatively impacting customer response times and impacting our ability to be the nimble business machine honed to win.

I have been writing about this topic for years but now it is at a point that business executives need to act. We have more technologies making more content with or without our involvement 24-7. Data volume nearly double every year and we couldn’t manage last year’s stuff efficiently. It only gets harder and something has to give. The real answer is not building bigger clouds of storage stacks. We can’t keep everything forever and there must be a prudent way to make wheat/chaff decisions about what should exist and what can be disposed of.

Three things you need to think to do right now:
1. Develop a team to start to clean up the past. Existing data needs to go away according to law and policy now.
2. Better decisions need to be made about what comes into existence. Not everything needs to be retained.
3. Directives that stop the wheels of progress due to FUD (Fear,Uncertainty and Doubt)should not rule the day. Fight the lawyer’s shotgun approach to preservation. For example, if back up tapes are recycled regularly don’t stop that process if a lawsuit if filed, unless required to.

Get your information house in order. Your business depends on it.

The Three Bears Solution

Can I get rid of all that “old” information tomorrow?

“My company is so full of info debris that we are no longer efficient." “Hey Randy, why can't we just get rid of everything right now and have clean servers and start fresh tomorrow?" Seems like a wonderful idea. After all its spring time—the perfect time for spring cleaning.

Don’t hit the delete button so fast, bucko. You can’t just blow everything away tomorrow and here is why.

Four compelling reasons why jail would be so not fun.
1. I don’t want a forced roommate.
2. I like going OUT for Asian food.
3. I don’t do well when told when to eat, sleep, relax, exercise etc. I like freedom.
4. I like to travel and jail would severely limit my freedom of movement.

Ok, so the law requires that records are retained. Every business, big and small is required to retain records of their business.

Four compelling business reasons why destroying everything immediately is stupid.
1. How can you manage your day-to-day and long range business activities without records?
2. How do you know what your business rights and obligation are if you don’t have documentation?
3. How will you manage employees and customer relationships without something to rely upon?
4. How will you keep managers, board members, and executives apprised of what’s going on?

Ok, so there are business reasons to manage records and have a way to access and retrieve content to run your business.

The issue of over-retention of information is a major issue for most businesses today. Way too many companies are storing too much stuff, way too long. That equates to real money which could be better used for other business activities. So, more is not necessarily better. All is not tenable. Too little is a business impediment and a legal headache waiting to happen. So, I need a Three Bears Solution—“This pile of information is too big, this pile of information is too small. Oh—this pile of information is just right.” Easy in the porridge business. Not so easy in the information management business.

So, let me help you start to think about getting your business to the place that says we have just the right amount—not too much, not too little.

In order to retain the right amount of information, you first have to know what information you have, what business value it provides and the many legal, regulatory and compliance needs for the information. Then, by considering all those inputs you can determine how long to retain the information. As with anything, there is always an end to the value. This explains why you shouldn’t keep everything forever.

Now, I’m sure there is a whole bunch in the email system, on shared drives, on old servers, etc. just screaming to go to the info graveyard right now. But, how can you get rid of the data that has been stored and ill-managed over time. First, you need to do due diligence around what information exists. Second, you need to determine what information is subject to any audit, investigation or litigation preservation obligations. In that case, the information has to continue to exist until the matter is over and lawyers say it’s OK to destroy. Finally, you need to assess what record retention rules apply. It gets rather complicated pretty quick, so if you have question, please don’t hesitate to ask. Send your questions to RKahn@kahnconsultinginc.com. Better being safe than sorry.

Finally, I strongly believe in cleaning house but in today’s litigation environment you need to do it in a defensible way. No doubt leaner running is better business. But, innocent house cleaning can be considered “destruction of evidence” so clean with a documented plan that is followed and blessed by the business folks and the lawyers.

Time for Spring Cleaning

Long ago, certain Indian tribes were given plots of land out west from the Federal government because the US took their real land years earlier. Thereafter, the Federal government realized that the land they had given out could be used for mining, grazing, extracting oil and gas and other money making ventures. So the federal government told the Indian land owners they would lease their land out for them and deposit the proceeds into accounts set up for the benefit of the Indian landowners. Well, things didn’t go as planned. In fact, many Indians didn’t receive what they thought they should be receiving and the monies from the leases weren’t finding their way into Indian hands. So after many years of trying to get what they had coming to them, in 1996ish, the Indians decided to sue the federal government. They sued for an accounting of the monies taken in from the leases and where the money was being dispersed. The problem was that the federal government had done a really bad job at record keeping so they weren’t even sure what went where and to whom.

Let me share a civics lessons I learned in middle school — the government is here for the US people (which includes Indians) and are put in a position of trust because they are believed to be able to do right by the people of the country. When the money didn’t come as expected the trust began to be eroded (actually the Indians trust in US had been eroded over a couple centuries pretty substantially any way).

As the lawsuit got underway, what was really clear is that there was so much information which had been mismanaged over decades, piecing together what really happened was going to be a major challenge. In deed, the Wall Street Journal, a paper which focuses on business and business failures, asserted the prediction that unearthing and producing records and evidence in the lawsuit would cost in the billions just to see if anything was relevant.

Let me share lessons learned from our consulting practice. If you don’t start cleaning info crud up, you fail to be as efficient a business as you can be and run a huge risk if a lawsuit or audit happens.

Back to our saga. Years go by, and the government gets lambasted for record keeping failure after record keeping failure of various kinds by the court. High-level government officials are held in contempt, get wacked for gross mismanagement, security failures etc.

After roughly 17 years of litigating the case is about to settle for around 3 billion dollars.

Seems like bad business all around.

Spring cleaning time folks. Get serious about cleaning over retained records. If you don’t know where to start, call us.