Information Nation

Building an Information Management Factory

2015-10-27T11:10:00.000-07:00

By Randolph Kahn

Years ago, email burst onto the business scene to become the premier business productivity tool used at work. Not surprising, the post office immediately started to witness the precipitous decline in the number of first class business letters being sent. Revenue from first-class mail in 2000 was $91 Billion, and according to the US GAO it’s projected to be $39 Billion in 2020. Email was a game changer for which the post office didn’t have an immediate answer. The USPO tried staying open later and also tried selling non-mailing related products. The USPO even allowed customized stamps to be printed at home. But in the end, the only way the USPO was going to replace the revenue lost due in large part to email use which replaced the first class letter was with truly transformative change. Maybe there wasn’t really a viable answer. But whatever was tried was incremental in nature and insufficient to stem the bleeding that was catastrophic to the letter mailing business.

Some kid has the bright idea that he can build an online network for people to share music for free, over the internet. Wonderful idea, unless of course you are the artists who created the music or the music companies that sell it. In either case, both will be directly and substantially impacted. The music industry was ill prepared for this transformational change and it started to flail immediately trying to seize control of the problem. Whether you embrace change or fight it when confronted with transformational changes will in part dictate your future. But we will come back to that in a minute.

First the Recording Industry Association (RIA) sued the creators of the various such music sharing environments. Then the RIA sued select “borrowers” of the online “free” music to send a message to the rest of the snot nosed kids. This approach didn’t address the heart of the issue either and made the industry look like bullies. While they were trying to stop transformational change with ineffective incremental baby steps, the winners, the ones building transformational solutions, were creating new ways to build value and business around a new reality-- that music could flow fast and freely across the web.

For Apple, which figured out how to deliver the music and sell it, they have been handsomely rewarded. Many artists now sell their music one song at a time through the Apple music ecosystem or elsewhere or even sell it directly to listeners. For companies like Sony and their famed Walkman, the story of their decline is well documented and painful.

But this is not an article about business transformation generally. Rather, it’s an article about how global business is going to deal with an information landscape that is rapidly evolving and morphing in unpredictable ways. It’s about companies being overwhelmed by a tsunami of data routinely impacting IT frameworks, storage networks, servers and employees. It’s also about more competing laws and rules that can’t be applied or followed at the document or file level. It’s about big data demanding more information to crawl through while the privacy officer is pushing for the company to keep less information.

If information grew at 2 or 3% per year, then maybe employees could manage privacy, protect company trade secrets or handle the task of records management. But most organizations’ Information Footprints are growing at 25-50% per year and that is not the only challenge. More company information exists outside the company firewall than ever before, making control and access a new complexity. There has been a proliferation of new laws and regulations dictating how organizations deal with litigation response, manage company IP, lock down health information or classify records.

How does a company deal with the “Perfect Information Storm” where massive volume meets massive management complexities, which collides with burgeoning laws all of which can result in existential consequences from mismanagement.

Every day Bob goes to work and like the day before, he does exactly what he did every day before that day. Perhaps boring for Bob, but predictable for the company and the factory in which Bob works, the products that are created look and function exactly like the ones produced yesterday. That is because the process by which they were created was well, a process meant to predictably create the widget the same way, day in and day out. Behind the factory is the concept that building a good manufacturing process in turn ensures that the widget or whatever, is built predictably good enough, every time. The whole idea is that once the factory is built well, there is no need to rethink the manufacturing process every time another widget is made. If I focus on making each widget by hand when I need to make scads of them, then I am committing to a process that is wrong for the task. On the other hand, if I wanted to craft a fine painting, the manufacturing process is not right for the task.

Contrary to popular belief, information is not so unique that it requires the master artisan’s touch to manage it properly. Even if that were true and its not, that is simply no longer doable as we have too much information volume and its getting bigger all the time. And even more importantly, if you asked 10 employees about the business value of a document, they would likely have different CORRECT ways to manage or classify it. Its something like- one man’s record is another man’s junk. Or better stated, everyone, no matter how much training they have received, evaluates information differently. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. And that is because where you sit in the organization, your educational background, risk tolerance, understanding of the content, etc. all impact how you evaluate whether or not it’s a record, if its private, it it’s a trade secret, etc.

Compliance with laws won’t get any easier. The places data is parked won’t get fewer and volume of information won’t get less voluminous. Each one of those is game changing. Yet folks still wear their incremental information management hat limping along trying to solve a transformative problem with the wrong tool. Like eating an ocean sized pot of soup with a spoon. Transformational change needs transformation solutions not incremental ones.

So what to do?

Build an Information Management Factory. You need to solve the problem from the top down. Looking at the individual file when there are hundreds of millions or billions of them can’t work. Think reproducible. Think massive. Think through-put. Think practical. Think transformational.

Can or should a company ever even contemplate managing hundreds of millions of files with rules built for a time when there were no computers and a few dozen paper records. The information management space is solving a transformational change issue with wimpy incremental ideas whose days were numbered years ago. And yet people are still thinking there is a possibility that it could work. Get on the clue bus. Employees couldn’t manage company records 10 years ago when the company information footprint was 1/100 its current size, or less. Rethink and rework everything.

10 Things You Must Do Now to get Information Management Right?

1. Throw out old thinking, old policies, old ideas and tired information workers

2. Hire a new IM factory “Owner”

3. Build a multi-disciplinary IM Factory team

4. Develop the factory build out and agenda for the next 3 years

5. Build an IM Factory

6. Simplify rules so that all rules can be applied without much or any employee intervention

7. Use automation and applications to do the “heavy lifting”

8. Make certain environments “Non records” locations so that all content goes away after a couple years no matter what

9. Develop rules for every new info source upfront so end of life is predictable and contemplated

10. Apply simpler rules to all environments with focus on storage hogs

Don’t forget to buy some robots. Robots are good for everything.

Whether you embrace change or fight it, when confronted with today’s information realities, what is clear is that the problem isn’t getting any easier to solve. What is equally as clear is that you and your colleagues have not been very successful at solving it either. The reason is clear, minor incremental changes won’t solve the information management problem any more than a spoon can be used to serve up the ocean.

When faced with an exponential information growth problem, responding with incrementally better solutions won’t address the issue. In other words, managing into the current environment is unlike ever before as there is so much more content, in so many more places which the company doesn’t have control over. Its time for a whole new way to manage. It time for people to be smartly guide the factory in managing information. Employees can’t and shouldn’t manage stuff anymore. They are bad at it. They don’t have time for it. And there is too much of it to meaningfully attack the issue. Build a factory. Automated response. Whole environments managed as one. Time changes and you need to rework your thinking about what works.

I heard a funny joke-“How many Canadian post office employees does it take to deliver a letter?” Answer—“None as they are phasing out of home delivery because they are bleeding money”. Boom.

Epilogue

We have spent the last few years building IM factories. It’s doable and needed. If we can do it, so can you. Get busy

We the People Expect a Record

2015-10-27T11:09:00.001-07:00

I am exhausted by all the petty infighting. I am tired of the partisan politics. Just knock it off already. It’s nothing but wrangling between the political parties. Everyone gets it. It’s so painfully clear. Poor Hillary in another overly politicized inquisition to just tear away at her flesh and storied career.

Our republic is great. For me it is the greatest country that has ever existed. There are some other really good ones, but America is the “cat’s meow.” Loathe to be insensitive with my last idiomatic expression, I don’t want to offend cat owners or dog lovers or people who like leashes--well you get the idea.

America is great in part because it has advanced a unique form of government with built-in checks and balances, among many other institutional protections. What that means is that one branch of government can’t push around another branch. After all, we evolved out of a polity where the king or queen held sway and the Constitutional Framers decided the monarchy wouldn’t work here. That means that Congress can’t make war by itself and when the President can’t get his ideas passed through Congress, he can’t circumvent the process with some king-like Executive Order to frustrate the process, for example (the Iran Nuclear deal advanced through Executive Order notwithstanding).

Another unique feature of our democracy is governmental transparency. We get to see what our elected officials do or not do. They are supposed to memorialize their actions in the government record for posterity and transparency sake. Thereafter our laws, like Freedom of Information, ensure that we have an optic into governmental activities, assuming it isn’t classified. Because we don’t want just anyone seeing our classified information.

Another really great thing about America is our advancement of individual freedoms embodied in the Bill of Rights, among other places. But it seems like sometimes when our great American values collide, we have to have a predictable way to advance the most important values of our great land. The right to do whatever you want, whenever you want is not likely going to win especially when it’s the government at issue.

So if you are a government worker and you don’t like having a government email, too bad so sad. All employees can’t do what they want at work, including the US Government employees. Or if you don’t like the government provided IT staff, technology choices or functionality provided to get your job done, you can’t just find a cheapo cloud provider and use their free IT email and storage services for your government work because, come on, that would undermine the whole accountability/transparency thing that made our great nation great. But Hillary Clinton is different. She is the boss. So when she tells the entire State Department to refrain from using personal email for government work, she was talking to everyone but herself. And when she complains about managing the complexity of multiple communications devices, then she should be able to get rid of her government email all together, right? Come on, she’s the boss and should be able to use a private server located in her basement to manage US foreign affairs for all other nations because it’s just way easier for her. And if she wants to manage state secrets through an IT provider in Colorado located in a strip mall, then she should be allowed to, because, come on, she’s the Queen Bee. Come on, this is America, “Land of the Home and Free of the Brave.” Freedom rules. But we do not have kings and queens and that’s the really great part of our great land.

I sure wish they would stop busting Clinton’s chops over the information she sent or received via email. Even if it was classified it wasn’t marked classified so not one of the bad guys would have bothered to hack her account and read such boring stuff. (Yes, I heard the “rumor” that several foreign governments tried to hack her server, but who knows if it’s really true.)

And then there is the personal vs. government issue—you don’t think her aids know the difference between a wedding invitation discussion and an explanation of security threat in Libya and the likelihood of a major terror attack on our diplomatic presence there? Why not let Clinton decide when she will turn over records in accordance with the Federal Records Act, because after all, transparency can happen sometime in the future—maybe after she is elected queen. And don’t you think the Secretary of State is the best person at the State Department to know what is classified or top- secret and how to protect it. For that matter, I bet she knows best how to secure data, and between her Colorado IT shop in the mall and the NSA or Department of State security personnel, I am sure she had it all locked down and buttoned up. “Hey, can I get some help over here working my fax machine.” And why bother with the National Archives and Records Administration to decide what is a government record worth keeping when Hillary will give us what she hasn’t destroyed when she decides it’s time.

It’s an election year and that is all this is—partisan politics. I hate the sabre rattling about the silly email security stuff.

On the other hand, if she wasn’t running for President of the United States and her former boss wasn’t the king, I wonder if Hillary would be prosecuted for her mishandling of sensitive government information the way others have been. Thank goodness for transparency and accountability. I see myself as an Independent. I am not anti-Hillary. But this is not about Clinton or the Republican’s trying to make hay from the Benghazi tragedy. For me, it’s about making a record. I am for ensuring America’s greatness by keeping a complete record and making it open to the citizens. I am also for protecting government secrets. I am also for applying a little reasonableness to the discussion. If what Hillary did doesn’t bother you a little, perhaps you are too colored by Fall foliage or the election season. Just saying.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.

2014-06-12T10:06:00.001-07:00

I am not sure I have any good way to say what I am about to say. And in fact, I am so trepidatious that I have to couch my commentary in verbiage subterfuge. I am not spineless, but just don’t want to create a bunch of enemies with my cohort. So here goes. I am certain you will get my point even if I hide the true identities of the offending parties to protect the innocent and/or guilty.

Assume for a moment that an international information association, decided that the industry and more specifically companies needed a way to assess if they had a mature information management program. So the organization got a bunch of their folks together to develop criteria by which they should evaluate if their program was good enough to pass muster. And let’s say after much talking and thinking they settled on an information management Maturity Model and related criteria.

Recently, a client of ours had us look at their self-assessment of their information management program using one such Maturity Model Best Practice self-assessment tool. (The client is now considering having us perform a new Gap Assessment). It is one of my favorite clients and it’s a great company that does so much right. So when I reviewed their self-assessment, I was stupefied. They used the information management’s organizations Maturity Model criteria and concluded they were seriously substandard. I totally disagreed with most of the conclusions of the assessment. I am not going to lay out why I think the various criteria are flawed in total, but let me give you an example to make my point. One of the criteria by which this company evaluated itself according to the self-assessment was information “integrity”. Based upon how the assessment MADE the client answer the questions, they got a flunking grade. I told my client given what I knew about their business processes and IT framework, that on the information integrity scale I would give them a Rhodes Scholar type grade—at least an “A”. SO why such a disconnect?

I get the whole thing about “one man’s hot is another man’s cold” but this is not about perception. It is about the criteria and maturing the process and still utterly failing even if what you have done is at least good enough. From my humble perspective, the evaluative criteria are aspirational, not functionally helpful, impracticable and may sell your company unfairly down the river. BOOM! I believe it sets up companies to fail that use the self-assessment, on criteria that are not really central to success. Every organization would be flagging miserably if put under the assessment’s microscope. And that’s just not the way it should be.

Which bring me to the PG&E San Bruno disaster and how industry “best practices” evaluations can be helpful at fixing failings and can also provide the basis for regulators to whack companies for failing to properly manage records, among other things. The tragedy was horrible. The loss of life and property is unthinkable. And the company may have had records management failings. But look close enough at any company and most organizations fail miserably. See the report at the following link. http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/23513DF5-28CB-425B-BAE4-0151981F0779/0/CPSD_Recordkeeping_OII_Report_Final.PDF

There are lots of information management industry standards, best practices, evaluations from all sorts of organizations. There is some terrific guidance and there are some downright damaging unattainable “best practices”. I’m sure all comes into being with great intentions. But massaged, manipulated and maneuvered by lawyers and a good company begins to smell dirty.

We developed a methodology called “Information Management Compliance” for evaluating the “goodness” of your Information Governance Program which has been used by so many companies. I borrowed the criteria from the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which help judges evaluate what is good corporate behavior. I figured if the court will evaluate your company by the criteria, that you should build your program according to the criteria. (This is also the topic of “Information Nation-Seven Keys to Information Management Compliance”, See also http://www.arma.org/bookstore/files/Kahn.pdf.

Look close enough at any company’s information management practices and you will find flaws. Lawyers are in the business of exploiting flaws. I don’t need to give them material to work with that isn’t even real. So companies, evaluate carefully, document thoughtfully and pick criteria by which you evaluate circumspectly. Just saying.

Randolph Kahn, ESQ.

Data is the Target

2014-01-22T09:37:00.001-08:00

When your logo is a red bullseye and you’re in the retail business, I guess you should expect to be a target.

We are learning that more people were affected by the data breach at Target. We are learning that the breach was likely perpetrated by Eastern European cyber thugs and that tens of millions of Americans may be impacted to the tune of billions. What we haven’t seemed to learn is that no matter how vigilant and how much is spent seeking to protect the information Crown Jewels, that nothing can protect information completely from the criminals. There will be hacks and data will be stolen. But for the average person, while scary, what it tells them is that they need to take action to protect themselves. Perhaps that means getting identity theft insurance or some protection from cyber crime.

However, more importantly what does this mean for business? What can be done to mitigate the harm and risk? Insurance shifts the risk and is a good thing but it doesn't solve the underlying problem. More IT security is useful but how many more IT experts can be retained and will that solve the problem? I think not.

While I don’t have all the answers, I do want to share a story that makes the point that process and technology can help minimize the harm.

A few years ago, I was speaking in Southern France to a bunch of Hungarian bankers. They recounted how they were dealing with cyber theft which was a big issue in Hungary especially those people making credit card purchases. To combat theft of credit card info, the Hungarian banks implemented a simple and seemingly inexpensive system whereby every credit card holder got immediate and real time notice of any and all impending transactions on their cards. If the transaction was bogus, a text message could be instantly sent back to the bank to shut down the account and terminate the criminal transaction.

Well maybe the text notification system is not the right or only answer, but it seems like coming up with ways to make the theft less valuable by minimizing the transactions amounts or frequency will take a bite out of crime.

If you can’t undo all criminals hellbent on cyber crime, perhaps we can get creative and interactive to diminish the economic harm.

I’m interested in what you would do about cyber theft. Email me your ideas at rkahn@kahnconsultinginc.com

Make Your OSHA Injury Records Available to the Public--Say What?

2013-11-08T13:14:00.001-08:00

Companies must retain records. From time to time regulators ask to see those records. When companies fail to produce the requested information, there is usually a consequence-from a minor hand slap to a full-fledged flogging.

For big companies that are required to retain worker injury and illness records (that is many businesses) to comply with OSHA, that records keeping requirements may be about to get more painful.

The US Labor Department just proposed a new rule that would require companies with more than 250 employees to file electronic injury reports and make these records AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC. I don’t know if that is better or worse than making the CIA disclose records about interrogating terrorists, but I would bet that most companies will have something to say about it.

What do you think—good transparency or an accident waiting to happen? Pun intended. Boom.

The Tale of Two Bobs

2013-10-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

This is the tale of two Bobs. One Bob—let’s call him Robert, works for a large financial services company as a senior IT executive. The other Bob, let’s call him Bobby, is a super quick, super smart, super happening twenty-something having graduated from that amazing university around the corner with a tree as its mascot. He went from Palo Alto to somewhere between San Francisco and pathetically wealthy, way too early.

Robert has had a different career trajectory. Twenty six years, three months, six days, fourteen hours and thirty three minutes at the same company slogging it out through the ranks. Boom, his slightly above average pay check comes every two weeks whether he needs it or not. He evaluates, he tests, he researches, he does an ROI, he purchases, he implements, all in the hopes that the technology he just bet his reputation on will help make his company “faster, better and cheaper.”

Robert set in New York. Bobby flitting to and fro, somewhere south of San Francisco. Their worlds seemingly, well, worlds apart. Yet they collide.

The article in the October 22, 2013 Wall Street Journal read, “Request by CFTC has Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and Others Sifting Through Trader’s Emails, Chats.” So what’s the big whoop -- a bunch of financial services companies have to produce some business records to a regulator. And by the way, why does that have anything to do with Bobby? You read on, “Deutsch Bank, the world’s largest foreign-exchange dealing bank… is spending millions of dollars scouring traders’ emails, and chat sessions…” This is the deal-- there are many Bobby-types that each and every day work of developing new technologies for whomever will buy them. Then someone working at Big Company brings some new technology into the enterprise. While some companies preempt such conduct, many others leave the door wide open. And when there is nothing to prohibit the introduction of technology “from the street”, new technologies made by the Bobbies of the world find their way into your business. What the Roberts of the word forget about is that, for each new technology that Bobby makes, there will be some informational output. Increasingly, there are mountains of informational output that make Robert’s job increasingly more challenging in several kinds of ways. More information, in more places, that doesn’t lend itself to easy management. And when Bobby builds, he usually is not thinking about how the new technology will be used by a financial services company with very stringent records keeping requirements. As the Wall Street Journal article makes clear that new casual information output may be a company record that needs to be retained and possibly produced to a regulator down the road. Unearthing information is invasive, complex and costly.

Over the years, not surprisingly, the laws have reacted to the technology marketplace. Over the years the financial services regulators have been dealing with the creations of the Bobby’s of the world. Regulations and laws have already popped onto the legal landscape to deal with legality of storing electronic information on computers, retention of email, chat technologies and social media. There are rulings on just about every new communication technology being used in the financial industry and if not it will be coming in one form or another.

Which brings me to my real point.

1. Companies are failing at information management and can’t discern records requiring retention and information that can be disposed. That needs to change.

2. Companies are not proactive enough when allowing or implementing new technologies—companies need policy first that tells employees what to do and technology needs to be utilized that manages the lifecycle no matter how long or short.

3. Just because Bobby makes cool technology, unless there is a legitimate and documented business reason to allow technology, the technology shouldn't be allowed. Only after the business case has been satisfied, then the company needs to understand what their obligations with that new information chunk is and manage it accordingly.

Information Governance “Eight Essential Steps to Attacking the Piles”

2013-05-30T08:11:00.000-07:00

Maybe your Information Governance project is bogging down because you are solving a problem that your colleagues don’t think exists.

Do you know the Muffin Man and if you do, do you care where he lives? I know Peter Pan thought Wendy could fly but did Wendy actually believe it? What if the band, “The Who”, was called, “The Why”?

Anyway, I was listening to a “one hit wonder” radio show when “Who Let the Dogs Out” came on. As I listened (though I wanted to change the channel several times), that got me wondering if “Who Let the Dogs Out” was really the operative question? Was the song really about dogs that are gone? If it was about dogs, why are we worried about blaming someone for letting the dogs out? Why not ask where the dogs went or better yet, how are we going to get them back? Further, do we really want them back?

And that got me thinking about all the questions we ask on a regular basis that drives us to seek answers to myriad business questions. But what if the right question is actually different than the one we asked? The answer that we get is different than one we would get if we asked the right question. And that got me thinking that we probably take actions based upon answers to the wrong questions all the time. So perhaps we choose the wrong path, because we ask the wrong question to begin with.

And that, of course, got me thinking about information sprawl and the piles of data growing unfettered all over every big organization. Why do the piles exist? Who is at fault? Maybe for certain business folks the piles were intended to grow? If not, how can we ensure that they are defensibly disposed when the information is no longer needed? In other words, why does the company allow the piles to exist? And then and only then can we really address the sprawl.

But wait, the right first question is, do the folks that create or keep piles think the piles have much value? I assume that so much of organizational information overload is outdated crud. But what if others think it’s all valuable information. If they do and I am nonetheless right, I will still need to change their thinking before I get to my questions. Otherwise attacking their piles doesn't make sense to them. They will be hard pressed to go along with spending time and resources cleaning up the pile. My questions assume there is lots of valueless stuff in the piles. Their perspective may be that the pile is all valuable. So it makes sense to not assume anything and ask the right question of the right folks.

And that got me thinking about planning my attack on the reason the piles exist. So here are “Eight Essential Steps to Attacking the Piles.”

1. Who is your audience? Knowing who your audience is will matter for two reasons. First, who they are in the company or what they do for a job impacts how they see the world and the reason the piles exist in that world. For example, litigators see evidence and their inclination may be to refrain ever destroying any of it. To get their approval to cleaning house will require allaying their concern for destruction of evidence and the impact that would have on a case, the company and their career. If I can’t address their worry, usually all other efforts to get rid of information, even if it makes business sense, will be fruitless.

If I am talking to a project manager on a “Big Data” business process improvement initiative, that person will likely see the piles as being a treasure trove of valuable business information that can be analyzed, scrutinized, and monetized. Getting rid of the pile will likely be perceived as making her job a lot more challenging and literally sucking the lifeblood out of her project.

2. You need to answer whether or not your audience thinks that they own fixing the problem? If they don’t take any ownership around the piles, then convincing them to take action is fruitless.

What if the person I am talking to is the head of storage and is under no compunction to care about making the piles smaller. First, she doesn't think she owns the information (which is owned by the business) so therefore taking action to “right-size” the pile is neither her problem nor her province. Do you think she will like her budget being reduced if the piles are smaller? If she has 30% less data to store and 30% less budget that has real impact to her department, head count and budget. She may not care whether the content is valuable or not. She cares about budget. So I have to know who I am talking to in order to speak a language that gets through to her. Maybe cutting waste will provide sufficient incentive and saving millions will be recognized by the executives, but in the end, what moves the recipient will be directly related to where they sit in the organization and how they perceive the problem.

3. Does your audience think there is business value in the piles?

For data miners big is better. For the CFO, saving millions is a way to ensure longevity in his coveted job and provide value to shareholders. For users they want access to their information and their instinct is always that everything is important. So first it is essential to understand that everyone, to a greater or lesser degree, has packrat tendencies.

In order to take on house cleaning, there has to be a more objective way to evaluate information value to the enterprise without being clouded by subjective and personal opinions of individual employees. If your organization has a retention schedule and the retention rules were properly developed then real business interest and needs and the true business value for the information across the organization should already be known. And there is NO need to revisit business value question.

And that begs another very important question—if you have retention rules and are not applying them to various types of electronic records, does that undermine your records program. Answer—you betcha. Which is Canadian for “You’re darn tootin”, which is Alabaman for Duh, which is American middle schooler for…You get the idea.

If you don’t have a good schedule then you will need to assess value in a different non-emotional, non-personal way.

4. Do they think there is legal value in the piles?

Some lawyers want everything gone tomorrow and other want everything forever. But in the end neither approach is viable. So you have piles and somehow you will need to answer two questions before the lawyers will go along with house cleaning. One, does the pile contain any records required to be retained? Two, is there any information that otherwise still needs to be preserved for audit, litigation, investigations or other formal matters? If the answer to both questions is no and can be demonstrated with sufficient diligence (hopefully without looking at every document), then the lawyers should be comfortable with cleaning house. No matter, you will need to work with them A LOT as they are a nervous bunch.

Remember different lawyers see the world differently. Compliance lawyers will be thinking compliance with policies and laws. Corporate lawyers will be thinking business needs and maybe risk. Litigators are motivated by making sure the company doesn't get whacked in litigation for failing to produce evidence. Revert back to number 1 above so you can speak to each group and move them by speaking their language and addressing their concern.

5. Who owns the storage “parking lot” in which the piles are piled up?

Taking on the piles requires understanding who actually owns the technology and applications on which the content sits. Does a business own the application and technology? Do all business units park data in that environment? Will the technology owner be authorized to take action to clean up the content on their system? Remember the owner of the storage “parking lot” is likely not going to be the same person who owns the records or content.

6. Who owns the content in the piles?

To make information go away, you will need buy in on agreement from the business folks who really own the information. The business unit owners own the content and you will need to get their involvement in the process. What do they need to hear, to believe that the piles can be culled of crud? If they paid for its storage directly out of their budget would that move them to action?

7. The next question is how to take on the challenge.

Defensible disposition is no small task. It is dirty, complicated, and not without expense (with potentially significant savings). It requires effort from within and outside the organization. But different chunks of data can and must go away and each will require a different diligence process depending upon what the pile is, how old it is, whether it is subject to litigation, if it is being used for business, if it is technically disaster recovery back up piles, etc. Remember you are getting rid of chunks and piles and chunks within piles not individual documents so making these culling decisions requires expertise and convincing lawyers that it is ok.

8. How can you make the case that the piles need to go away?

Information is growing at 20-50% per year if your organization is like others. Businesses already are having a hard time finding information to run their business. Litigation response has gotten costlier and more painful—another data point to tell you information governance is broken. Bad up front management means expensive e-discovery events will likely follow. We have clients that stand to save tens of millions of dollars just through storage savings over the life of the project. That seems like a compelling motivator for any executive. There are many more compelling facts that argue in favor of taking action, but they need to be tempered against real costs and risks.

There are a whole lot of questions. The place you start asking may be way too far down the road. Assume nothing. Ask the right question of the right person. But ask?

By the way, “Why Did They Let the Dogs Out?” is a less catchy name for the song for sure, but it’s an essential inquiry nonetheless.

The Case for Rightsizing Your Information Footprint, Cleaning House and Stopping Stupidity

2013-03-12T09:50:00.002-07:00

Demystifying Storage Is Cheap

It’s really funny when a smart IT person tells me that “storage is cheap” and asks why they should clean house of digital data debris (D3). For most businesses their information volume is growing between 30-50 % per year. The decline in storage cost per terabyte is a few % per year. So in real terms, most businesses are spending way more in real dollars to store information. The storage cost along for 1 petabyte of information is roughly between $5-10 million per year. So why care about D3—because if you could get rid of some of it, there is potentially a whole bunch of savings associated with the action.

In a few short years Facebook has amassed an information pile that is not surprisingly really massive. According to the March 11, 2013 Wall Street Journal the data comprising just Facebook users alone is 100 petabytes of stuff. For those of you not tapped into information volumes, that is a 1 followed by 17 zeros. In simple terms that is in excess of a hundred billion files. Imagine what the Facebook info trove will look like after a few decades in business.

Debunking Big Data

Big data is not just a description of a huge pile of info. Rather Big Data is the idea that if you take your big pile of info minus D3 and connect the dots using powerful analytics technologies, that you will be a faster and better business. You can learn things about business past and future to be more efficient. Assuming that you can actually pull off harnessing Big Data for big value, the D3 is still unneeded information background noise that makes unearthing info import that much more challenging. So get rid of D3.

Lawyers are People too and Litigators are Predictably Short Sided

Contrary to popular belief, lawyers are people too. They make mistakes just like the rest of you people. When they do something that is going to add to your pile of D3 and you don’t know why, stop and address the issue. Usually lawyers stop the wheels of progress (i.e. preserve the back-up tapes though policy says it should go away after a short time) or cleaning up the crud because the one involved litigator sleeps better being able to say that nothing could have been destroyed because they don’t destroy anything. The problem is that while they are sucking their thumb in their bunny eared feety pajamas the IT folks are up wandering the halls wondering how they will pay for the mess and keep systems running without overloading and seizing up. Once this “Lawyer Induced Everything Saved” (LIES) regime is started, trying to unwind it is really difficult especially with so many subsequent lawsuits. So unless a court mandates the “save everything” regime, don’t give in. “You’re smart enough, and strong enough, and gosh darn it I like you.”

Get Your Information Retention Under Control

2013-02-21T11:21:00.000-08:00

Most sizable companies spend millions or tens of millions of dollars every year storing unneeded business content. So please don’t get me started about the fallacious “storage is cheap” hokum.

The CIO is tired of having his dog wagged by the legal tail whose mantra is getting old. It sounds like this-- “But wait, WHAT IF we need that one document for a lawsuit and it’s gone”. So don’t get me started about how we should keep everything just in case there is a lawsuit down the road for which we need a specific document. That approach is contrary to your records policies and makes little or no sense.

Ok this is the reality, you can’t keep everything forever, buy you are afraid. If only I could hear it from a judge that would make me comforted.

Your wish is my command. I’m a Defensible Disposition fairy.

A lawyer seeks to justify why her company needs to keep all information.

“…part of the reason eDiscovery is so expensive is because companies have so much data, that serves no business need, but it’s so easy just to keep it there…. I think despite the economy, companies are going to realize that it’s important to get their information retention, their information governance under control, get rid of the data that has no business need and mine the data that has business needs – you know the so called Big Data – things like that in ways that will improve the company's bottom line on the business side and reduce costs on the eDiscovery side as a benefit as well.”

United States Federal Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck, “JD Supra Law News,” February 4, 2013.

Information Mismanagement

2013-01-22T09:51:00.001-08:00

A company filled with smart employees and not dissimilar from many others like it does something that I think is short-sided, risky and wasteful of limited company assets. The company lawyers think their practice is entirely prudent. Their IT folks don’t agree but they are afraid to let the lawyers know what they really think. But we will come back to that point.

I would like to say that we could chalk this different way to solve this problem to “different strokes for different folks”, but that is not what I really think. I think they are wrong. I think they are lazy and short-sided. I think they put a gun in their hand and keep loading it with bullets and don’t expect that at some point down the road somebody may get hurt.

Oh, I have still failed to tell you what I think is wrong. The company (or least the lawyers of the company) has decided, seemingly with both eyes open to keep all information they create or receive and store it away somewhere. Perhaps they still believe storage is cheap (for most companies storage volume is going up at between 20-50% per year when cost is coming down per terabyte at 5-10% which means overall, they are spending way more to store information) . Not to worry as they also believe the Tooth Fairy is an independent contract of Santa Claus. They keep all information—records and digital data debris alike. Seems like a bad business decision to me.

They take this approach to information mismanagement for 3 major reasons:

1. Lawyers feel better keeping everything because they don’t have to worry about not having something when litigation happens.

2. They don’t have to worry about providing real legal hold guidance about what needs to be preserved to employees at the time of a lawsuit.

3. The company doesn't know how to clean up all that electronic information in a legally defensible way?

Smart people can differ on things, but there is something about this debate that seems like the legal tail is wagging an expensive corporate dog around. This got me thinking that perhaps I needed to start a list of the things that make keeping everything forever really a bad idea. Thereafter, we can put that up against the lawyers list of one and see who wins. BTW-I have a pretty good idea how this story ends. So here are my top 10. You can email me (rkahn@kahnconsultinginc.com) with your additions to the list.

Storage is not cheap (per gig cost is going down but that savings is dwarfed by the growth of data)
Keeping everything makes finding needed information more challenging
Discovery rules require taking action upfront to know your sources of info and then in a case to find responsive information and work with the other side to deal with discovery issues upfront
Legal hold requires action soon after notice of a lawsuit
The “meet and confer” requires lawyers get together at the beginning of the case to discuss, among other things, discovery issues. That presupposes you know specifically what information exists and where
Once you start keeping everything forever and don’t separate it for a lawsuit, it’s tough to apply regular retention rules to clean stuff up without the risk of destroying evidence
Employee time is increasing just to be able to find needed information
Information utility is inextricably linked to expeditious retrieval and access
Companies are already running their businesses inefficiently as they can’t readily find needed business content
Once commingling content, their record program is effectively a nullity and defensible disposition becomes much more challenging

Information Management

2012-11-28T11:51:00.000-08:00

A mind set change. A transformation. A Friend. A Better use of Limited Budgets.

Having just finished rereading a Chicago Tribune article entitled “Getting to Zero”, I remain perplexed about how aspirational information management really is. The article recounts the need for employees to get their work email inbox down to ZERO messages or as close as possible. In other words, having a clean inbox means that employees will “feel more organized and less stressed by the daily email avalanche”. No doubt having fewer email messages to read frees up time. But in order to have fewer emails to deal with, they either shouldn’t get directed your way to begin with or they have already been dealt with. I can’t make the business use of email go away. But, I can help get rid of the email clutter once it’s there.

A mind set change. For all records managers you will hate what I am going to say. Employees aren’t going to classify and code email messages according to their retention value and if they did, they would get it wrong most of the time. Change your thinking because the way you think about the problem, even if intellectually correct is practically unreasonable. So while some email may have longer term value, the great preponderance of them has no on-going value after a very short period of time. For all of those messages, I want the system to blow them away right after they no longer are needed. That will make your email box volume go way down real quick. Maybe not zero, but way less. For the few messages that have on-going business value, there has to be a simple way to deal with those. While imperfect and contrary to what I once thought, email as a business communication needs to have one retention period that the system can manage without employee involvement. Easy to implement and use. Imperfect for one of a kind content that truly has ongoing business value.

A transformation. Transform a problem into a business solution and victory. Too much email means an unhappy employee, an overburdened email system; a workforce stretched thin, lower customer satisfaction, great private information risk, higher litigation response costs and risks, CIO budget wasted on storing extraneous digital data debris, etc. If I can get rid of all email but the few with long term business or legal value then I will solve a whole bunch of problems contemporaneously. The thing most companies forget about is users’ needs, so give employees a place to temporarily house needed messages and prohibit messages from being stored outside that environment.

Imagine a world with only a few emails. Imagine having a better relationship with employees, customers, email administrators and the CIO.

Information Classification

2012-09-21T10:00:00.003-07:00

Information classification is the process of arranging information with shared characteristics. It is a lot harder than what meets the eye. And if it’s the employees classifying data (increasingly a non-issue as there is way too much information), it’s more like an art than a science and more like contextual guesstimating than measuring. Even harder when a user must make the determination on what is a formal record(required for legal or regulatory reasons) – vs. what is not. And there is a really good explanation as to why that’s the reality.

Today around the globe, employees do business, real business in Facebook, Twitter, blogs, SharePoint, text messages and email. As email has been the business tool of choice for many years and as there are billions of them used in business every day, it’s a good place to start to explore just why having 100% exactitude in classifying is not a reality.

Let’s delve into an example to start to understand just how complicated the mere act of classifying information can be.

Lily, the manager of the sales support unit gets the following email from Teddy, the head of the leasing business unit. You make the call—is it a record and if so, how should it be classified?

“Thanks for overseeing the Ace Leasing deal. I thought your assistant manager, Dylan did a good job and I think he is ready for bigger challenges and a boost in pay. It would have been useful if he brought contracting in sooner. We should really think about how to make the documentation process touch fewer hands and simpler over all. Also, we need to get implementation services involved ASAP. Please have Riley from contracting confirm the pricing, as it wasn’t on the attached proposal.

Best, Teddy.

BTW-say hi to your daughter Cooper.”

This email or millions like it happen every day, all day long. If you were asked to classify it, would you say it’s a record requiring long term retention? If you did, what kind of record is it?

If you had any employee determine what the business value of the email was, they could classify it many different, albeit CORRECT ways. Most employees predictably classify information with a parochial perspective about what it is based on their work experience. If Lily, the recipient classified it, she would be colored by the utility of the email for her job or department. In that case maybe it’s a sales record which should be put in the Ace Leasing file. On the other hand, as a manager she may see it as an HR related record, which recommends advancing Dylan and getting him a pay raise. Maybe it should even go into Lily’s personnel folder as being complimentary of her good management of her unit. Maybe the email is a record for the contracting department or instructions for the implementation of the project. Maybe it’s also a record for the Business Process Improvement team to fix the business process as management thinks it’s broken. Fact is it could properly be classified as all those types of records. All different records have different retention periods associated with them. And further depending upon who classifies and what business unit they are from, the result may be substantially different.

Not surprisingly, employees are not particularly good at classifying information, even the smart ones, and if they don’t need to do it, they won’t, and don’t even care. Now imagine each employee touches 100 information nuggets daily that need classification. This partly explains why classification is so difficult. It also makes the point that there are many subjective right answers. I believe many records could be properly classified in different correct ways. We sometime think there is only one right way.

For almost a decade I have been thinking about the use of auto-classification technology to classify and manage information. I used to think it wasn’t ready for prime time. Today it is really powerful when used properly. I then got hung up on lawyers attacking it giving a known failure rate. I got over that as they attack everything any way and reasonableness and information volumes dictate relying on technology to do the heavy classification lifting. Given information volumes and expecting employees to do the classifying is like asking your auditors to count the grains of sand on the beach, and classify them according to size and shape. And now I am down to how effective the technology has to be to allow your classification to be done by a computer. There are no hard and fast rules about confidence ratings or efficacy scores (sometimes referred to as F-Score,) even though most people would be substantially comforted if there were simple rules for what was good or good enough.

I know employees are not good at classification. I know that employees don’t have time to do it and even if they did, they usually won’t get it right. I know people classify information in different ways and rarely are consistent from employee to employee. I know information volumes for most big businesses are growing at 20-50% per year. I know computers can do classification. I know it is not simple or cheap to do auto-classification. I know it takes upfront effort to get auto-classification right. I know that a company can’t dispose of business information without some diligence process to ensure that records are retained and evidence is preserved. I know that I have concluded that every big business needs to consider defensible disposition of information using technology to make it happen. In the end, I know people will attack the process and they will attack the auto-classification soft underbelly—the failure rate, the confidence score, the F-Score. I used to think it had to be above 90% to be good enough. Then I thought well maybe 80% is good enough.

Well, I have changed my thinking because the paradigm bounding my thoughts on this topic is flawed. As the classification tool crawls, it uses linguistic and numerical analysis to determine what something is and how to properly classify it. In the end if the software tells me it believes it’s correct with a confidence score of 51% or higher—what that means is the software probably got it right but maybe there is another category that is also a good option. In the end people do exactly what the technology does, but we hold technology to a different and higher standard. I am not sure what the right confidence score is, but I think we need to give technology a chance and not look for reasons to dismiss its utility. Nothing’s perfect, including your employees.

Kahn’s 4 Keys to Defensible Disposition

2012-06-06T12:39:00.000-07:00

With virtually no companies methodically applying retention rules to their ever-growing information heaps, and no practical way for employees to discern what is needed and what is digital data debris, you need to be thinking about how you will defensibly dispose of info crud. After all, “innocent” technology folks have been forced to defend claims of destruction of evidence for merely recycling systems to make room for more stuff. So here are Kahn’s 4 Keys to Defensible Disposition.

Kahn’s 4 Keys to Defensible Disposition

1. There is sufficient diligence (including review, audit, analysis by human and/or technology) to determine that the information subject to disposition is no longer needed for records retention or legal purposes.

2. The analysis and diligence process is managed by individuals without any personal interest or incentive in the disposition of the specific content subject to disposition and any disposition is undertaken with agreement and oversight by law department and relevant business unit heads.

3. The disposition process followed is documented, routinized and repeatable and all disposition actions taken are authorized, final, complete and irreversible.

4. Prior to any disposition, there will be sufficient notification of the proposed disposition actions to be taken, to the affected business unit heads and the legal representative to be able to immediately stop the disposition process if questions arise as to the appropriateness or legality of the disposition.

A Stream of Auto-Classification Consciousness by Randolph Kahn, ESQ.

2012-02-29T14:43:00.007-08:00

“But how will a court judge our use of auto-classification technology to do the heavy lifting regarding what information was a record and what was junk?”

“I want to be comfortable with our decision that using algorithmic classification software technology to apply our records retention rules and clean up the contents of our shared drive won’t get us flogged by a regulator or a court.”

“I am concerned that if we get rid of this data without having our employees review it manually, that we are open to attack in a court.”

We have empirical data to support the proposition that employees classify and code information way worse than computers, by a long shot. Yet most companies continue to rely on their employees to manage information. “[T]echnology-assisted process, in which only a small fraction of the document collection is ever examined by humans, can yield higher recall and/or precision than an exhaustive manual review process, in which the entire document collection is examined and coded by humans.” Technology-Assisted Review in E-Discovery Can Be More Effective and More Efficient Than Exhaustive Manual Review, Maura R. Grossman, JD., Ph.D. and Gordon V. Cormack, Ph.D.

Most big companies have petabytes of structure and unstructured content, which is billions of files. Do you think a judge would say it was "reasonable" to expect employees to classify and review billions of files before they could be purged? According to the Council of Information Auto-Classification’s “The Information Explosion Survey”, 98% of organizations reported rapid information growth that they predict will extend into the future and that growth is creating a variety of challenges and consequences. Half of the respondents indicated they are forced to recreate information previously created because they cannot find it. 74% of the organizations stated valuable information is being lost (i.e. can’t find, disposed of, misplaced) due to the lack of proper technology solutions. 73% of respondents reported their organization misses business opportunities because they can’t efficiently access information.

Technology is amazingly powerful at uncovering value from information and connecting dots, at the same time people are impotent in the face of the mountain of data to make it make sense. People bet their life on the Genome project made possible by technology unearthing the connections in data, but you are not sure if you should use auto-classification technology to determine if an email is a record.

In an article entitled “Search, Forward: Will manual document review and keyword searches be replaced by computer-assisted coding” US Federal Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck wrote, “[p]erhaps they are looking for an opinion concluding that: “It is the opinion of the court that the use of predictive coding is a proper and acceptable means of conducting searches under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and furthermore that the software provided for this purpose by [Insert name of your favorite vendor] is the software of choice in this court.” If so, it will be a long wait… Until there is a judicial opinion approving (or even critiquing) the use of predictive coding, counsel will just have to rely on this article as a sign of judicial approval. In my opinion, computer-assisted coding should be used in those cases where it will help “secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive” (Fed. R. Civ. P. 1) determination of case in our e-discovery world.

And Judge Peck strikes again in Moore v. Publicis Groupe, in his February 22, 2012 order in this case, “Computer-assisted review appears to be better than the available alternatives, and thus should be used in appropriate cases. While this Court recognizes that computer-assisted review is not perfect, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure do not require perfection…Counsel no longer have to worry about being the “first” or “guinea pig” for judicial acceptance of computer assisted review.”

If computer-assisted review is ok for finding relevant information for a lawsuit, why shouldn’t you be comfortable with using these types of technologies to classify records? Clearly applying records management rules is a far less risky proposition than responding to discovery. Auto-classification is a way to better manage and if appropriate, defensibly dispose of huge volumes of data when people can’t. The courts are now making that decision easier.

Is It Potentially Relevant?

2011-12-12T07:33:00.000-08:00

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 . . .

2011-10-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-26T10:09:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-19T11:31:00.002-07:00

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.

Records speak for themselves

2011-03-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

Peter king, the Congressman that heads up the Homeland Security Committee, is preparing for hearings to evaluate the threat and security risk presented by the American Muslim community. Seems prudent as Muslims seem to be the only folks blowing themselves up the world over on a daily basis to kill, maim and scare. Muslims from many places around the world hate America and have acted to kill us and would act again if given the chance. Seems like there are innumerable data points to suggest that King’s efforts are prudent. That doesn’t mean that all Muslims are terrorists. Rather it means that there are enough data points to evaluate the risk posed by the community.

Then I read the WSJ story about this issue. According to the report the Obama administration’s deputy national security adviser apparently attacked Congressman King’s hearings stating to a group of Muslims “…and let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any faith…” That’s true but there is overwhelming information that there are radical Muslims in every corner of the globe willing to take on and/or take out the Judeo-Christian heritage. I’m a student of history and I’m not a fan of Political Correctness. Let the records of the past 10 years speak for themselves. Records record. Evidence Provides. Political Correctness denies.

Cleaning house is good but know when to stop.

2011-03-01T12:07:00.000-08:00

As I have written about many times, even predating the Massey mines disaster that killed 29 miners last year, there are so many record keeping issues that are part of the mining industry. From the government database tracking mining disasters, to documenting safety infractions, record keeping is central to getting it right and reporting on what went wrong. But let’s leave that for a moment to talk about the latest developments in the Massey mine saga.
The security chief at Massey was indicted yesterday for covering stuff up, including destroying safety records after the 29 miners were killed. I’m not sure whose bright idea it was to “clean house” allegedly nefariously (AKA destroying evidence, or spoliation) after the guy, the company, or both knew they were in deep dodo. One thing is clear, when cleaning house happens to cover your tracks when you know (or reasonable should anticipate) there will be lawsuits or government investigations or both, that is the time to not destroy anything. Unless of course you are desirous of having a new boy friend and a limited meal plan while doing time.
Interestingly, in the case the General Counsel of Massey claimed that they advised the U.S. attorney's office “within hours of learning that documents” had been destroyed “and took immediate steps to recover documents and turn them over to the U.S. attorney's office."

Lessons-- Have retention rules that allow you to clean house. Cleaning house is good cause it gets rid of the crud to allow you to be a more efficient business. However, at the first smell of trouble stop cleaning house and preserve everything that may be potentially relevant if you have a lawsuit, investigation or audit coming.

Let Employees Park Their Data Where They Want?

2011-02-25T09:36:00.000-08:00

Face it, employees don’t really care about records management. They believe it is somebody else’s problem. After all, it isn’t in their job description and it doesn’t make money - right?

The saying, “don’t try to put a square peg in a round hole” holds true when trying to park or store corporate information. Employees want the flexibility and user interface that SharePoint offers, so why fight it? Forcing employees into a rigid, non-friendly records management storage environment will only cause them to squirrel away data into their own storage environments such as hard drives, removable media, home PCs, etc. Let them use SharePoint if they want to - just get the right governance and controls in place behind the scene, upfront. It is better to give employees the environment they want, and are willing to use, then to force them to go underground with their data. Records management governance can be practically transparent to the end user in SharePoint, if done correctly. The employee gets the environment they want and the corporation gets the governance they want. Both win!

Brightstarr has partnered with Kahn Consulting, an industry leader in information management, to aid corporations in the use of SharePoint as their records management tool of choice. Let us help you manage your SharePoint environment to meet compliance requirements and give your employees an environment they love to work in.

Information Flows

2011-02-17T14:45:00.000-08:00

Information flows. Sometimes really fast. Sometimes it causes waves that are unintended and even seriously problematic. For example, email was never intended to be the business medium of choice for all business for all reasons. I’m sure no one ever thought that secret email communiqués from Arabian leaders supporting the US taking military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be disclosed. Wikileaks has made many government officials blush about many secrets sent in email form. Thus there is fall out. Ok, Enough of that.

I came up with a really great idea. Tell me what you think. I was going to advance an idea that changes the world with Twitter or FaceBook or any of the social networking sites. I was going to call it “Social Networking Overthrowing Totalitarianism” or “SNOT” for short. That way a few people in lands where leaders are not democratically elected can overthrow the bums. But wait, is the whole world ready for democracy? Do they really aspire for that type of freedom? Is the guy that stepped down actually a bum? Maybe he is way better than what will be coming. Overthrowing a “life-long” president, for example, doesn’t mean that democracy rings out all over.

Recently we failed to support our friend in Egypt and due to pressure “from the street” he was forced to step down. Remember he was our friend for years. We gave him billions of dollars in military support and some of our military technology. Now Egypt has the military running the show. A step forward?

When or if they have an election in Egypt, what if the Muslim Brotherhood is elected “fair and square?” What if another terrorist organization uses the democratic process to gain power so they could impose Sharia (Islamic law) on everyone. Maybe they will countenance the continued harassment and killing of the Coptic Christians. If it happens I guess I could change the name of my organization to “Social Networking Overthrowing Theocracy” or “Social Networking Overthrowing Thugs”.

Nuts. I just realized the Arab world is on fire in places like Bahrain, Syria, Iran all because information is flowing way too fast. Now maybe my organization is moot. I am so last week.

Yikes.