The AIIM Blog - Overcoming Information Chaos

Survey: Over-Preservation Threatens Effective Information Governance

Written by John Mancini | Feb 19, 2014 1:15:04 AM

AIIM recently collaborated with Cohasset Associates and ARMA in the eighth biennial survey on the evolution of Information Governance (over 1,300 participants).  Over a series of articles, I'm covering the major highlights -- and the implications for organizations as they continue to address the tension between Information Opportunity and Information Chaos.

The survey reports:

Legal Hold processes are more commonplace, but over-preservation is an immense challenge to the implementation of effective information lifecycle controls, thereby contributing to future risk and complexity. Faced with the fear of spoliation charges during litigation, the traditional risk-averse approach to preservation was to keep everything. The danger of this approach is that routine disposal can come to a screeching halt. This shutdown results in increased costs of storage, inefficiency, and litigation complexities.

Clearly, an effective governance strategy will be elusive as long as the following applies -- these are the pecentages reporting automatic disposition practices for the following kinds of content.

Cohasset recommends the following:

  1. Coordinate with Legal to terminate legal holds when the matter is resolved.
  2. Work with Legal, Information Technology, and the business areas to improve the precision of preservation.