Trusted Information - Adding Storage or Enforcing Retention: The Debate is Over

I did a joint webcast this week with InformationWeek on strategies to deal with information overload. On the webcast, we conducted a quick poll and I was fascinated by the results. 

The poll consisted of two questions:

1. What is your organization’s current, primary strategy for dealing with its information overload?

The choices and audience responses were:

1. Adding more storage  35.2%

2. Developing new enterprise retention policies to address information growth  29.6%

3. Enforcing enterprise retention policies more vigorously  9.3%

4. Don’t know  25.9%

2. What is your organization’s future, primary strategy for dealing with its information overload?

It had the same choices but far different audience responses:

1. Adding more storage  19.1%

2. Developing new enterprise retention policies to address information growth  29.8%

3. Enforcing enterprise retention policies more vigorously  25.5%

4. Don’t know  25.5%

Holy smokes Batman! … I think we are coming out of the dark ages. Keep in mind that InformationWeek serves an IT-centric audience and generally not the RIM or Legal stakeholders who are already passionate about retention and disposition of records and information. 

From this survey data I concluded the following from this IT-centric audience:

1. 29.6% already developing retention policies today in addition to those that already have them – this is progress.

2. Adding storage as a primary strategy will decrease from 35.2% to 19.2% – this is amazing … and may be the first time “adding storage” wasn’t the automatic answer.

3. Enforcing retention as a primary strategy will increase from 9.3% to 25.5% – IT professionals clearly understand that enforcing retention is “the” answer to controlling information growth, see Spring Cleaning for Information and How Long Do I Keep Information?

4. 55.3% will develop or enforce retention policies as a primary strategy in the future – more than 3 times now prefer this to adding storage.

5. Developing and enforcing retention policies is now the clear choice for a primary strategy to address information overload and growth over simply adding storage.

This isn’t the only data that supports this of course. According to Osterman Research, 70% of organizations share the same concern.

In any case, rejoice with me … Ding Dong the Witch is Dead!

Developing and enforcing retention policies is now the clear choice and current primary strategy over simply adding storage by all stakeholders … IT, Legal and RIM. Are you seeing the same change in thought and action in your organization? Let me know by sharing your thoughts.

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