Hoarding and ILM
There is another approach to hoarding - just let it be! It is less of a problem if a few conditions are met, as I described before in some other posts. The conditions are as follows:
- If all information is kept in an open digital format
- If there is an open security model (i.e. only really confidential information is stored under lock and key)
- If there is plenty of disk space (which is cheap today)
- And if there is a powerful search engine
Than you can make it work. But this is easier said than done, since managing large volumes of information needs some sophisticated technologies supporting optimal storage, supporting fast backup and effective restore, and it needs to be able to recognise versions of the same information.
Some hardware vendors like HP and EMC are now exploring this space and are coming up with so call ILM solutions (information lifecycle management). These are not just powerful storage servers, but 'intelligent' solutions, since they come with software that enable the optimal storage. The HW vendors see it is a way to get higher up the value chain and companies can benefit from this aim, since the hardware in the company becomes more valuable, since it is managed in a more intelligent way - win-win.
It sounds all promising, but at the same time there are no silver bullets, so I expect that ILM solutions only have the potential to work if they are accompanied by a lot of consultancy and a lot of drive within the company to make the implementations work.
Labels: hoarding, ILM, search
Hoarding
I am in the process of moving and then you realise how much people are hoarding stuff. Every job move a take about 1 or 2 boxes with me, full of old courses, interesting reference documents, etc. and usually I never see them again until the next job move. It is hard to break this habit and it is clear that I am not the only one. All around the company I see cupboards full of papers and I guess there is a lot of junk in it that we throw away, plus a few valuable gems that we may have lost ...
So is this a problem? Probably ... because paper takes up a lot of space, people loose a lot of time searching in their papers and valuable information may get lost, because the information is not accessible anymore (since it is store in some sort of personal collection).
So there is some merit in address the 'hoarding' problem. And actually there are ways to address this.
One - drastic way - is the idea of Open Plan offices. You may love or hate them, but for hoarding paper it is a good remedy. Just allocate little space for storage and then apply a clean desk policy and soon people are only retaining the most valuable information. Obviously this only works if there is also a good library type of function, else people start to throw things away that should have been retained.
This problem also extends to digital data and therefore a similar measure like clean desks can be applied to shared drives. Offer people a controlled environment for key documents and clear out the team space (say every week).
Another measure is the 'big brother' type measure of having a information delivery compliance monitor for what kind of documents need to be stored at the start and end of each business process. This works for repetitive processes (e.g. every project should have a signed off project plan, stored in the EDMS), but this does not work for more creative, or iterative environments. In that case it is hard to measure the value of what has been posted as key information, but than a manager could sign off on a general statement that key information was managed. All other information should be thrown away, or at least stored outside the prime information traffic areas. Note that this only works if it is on the manager's scorecard!
Getting people to rotate in the organisation is also a good way of cleaning the house once in a while. Usually people tend to clean up a lot of information at the ends of their jobs and the new person coming in can do another sweep.
Labels: hoarding, retention
