Riverbank It management

We live in an era of too much data – there’s more ‘stuff’ than you can ever hope to read or use. So how do you get it organised and how do you keep a focus on what’s important to your business? This is the topic we’ll look at over the next three months.

New data in – old data out

Your guiding principle should be “new data in – old data out”. Too many people see their company data store as a one-way flow of data. It just comes in. New e-mail is piling in every day and employees are creating new files every day. If old data never drops out of the system your data store will just grow and grow.

The costs of this unmanaged growth are two-fold. The first cost is financial. It costs you more and more to store more and more. The second cost is reduced productivity. The bigger the haystack of data the longer it takes to find the particular needle you need.

The answer, of course, is to move old data out of your system when it’s no longer required. Technically this is quite straightforward – Riverbank can install the necessary archiving software, NAS boxes and additional disks – but first you need a policy.

Your data management policy defines how you will manage your data. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Here are some examples:

• Every January we will move all documents that are more than 1 year old to our archive. 
• Every completed project will be archived six months after the completion date.
• All e-mail more than 6 months old will be archived out of the system.
• All inbound and outbound client e-mails will be copied to the relevant client e-mail folder.
• All client e-mail over one year old can then be archived.
• All deleted e-mail will be removed after 6 weeks.
• All users will have strict e-mail storage quotas to ensure they manage their inboxes.
• All customers that have not bought anything for over a year will be transferred to the archive.
• All customers who have not bought anything for over 5 years will be deleted from the archive.

As you can see from the examples above, moving old data out of your system doesn’t have to mean deleting it. Moving to an archive keeps the volume of live data under control, enabling you to work more efficiently.

When you mention the word ‘archive’ the first worry that people will have is how to view the archive and retrieve data from it. You might decide that it’s unlikely that they will ever need it so it can be offline and slow to retrieve from (but low-cost to you). On the other hand you might want to make it easy to retrieve data so you need the archive to be online and readily available. In this case your archive will be disk-based but using low-cost disks that provide large volumes of storage with lower performance.

Organising it all

Now that you are managing the sheer volume of data how do you organise it all? How do you make sure that the raw material, the data, is available in a form that others can usefully turn into valuable information? There are two schools of thought about this.

The first school of thought is that you need to have a very structured environment where it is clear what’s important. For areas that require instructions (like your company policy on drinking and driving) you do need to present information in a clear and structured manner. For this type of information Microsoft SharePoint is fast becoming mainstream. We look at how companies are using SharePoint in next month’s newsletter.

The second school of thought says “Don’t organise it. Leave it in a big heap and use the power of computer search to find it.” This is the Google approach and clearly it works very well. It works well when someone wants a range of options that might be what they are looking for. But it doesn’t work well if the person needs to be directed to the correct piece of information. We will look at network search in the September edition of the Riverbank newsletter.

Both views are correct, of course. The approach you take is determined by what you want to achieve. What is vital is that you don’t neglect data management altogether. You cannot afford to leave your staff without an efficient way of turning data into information and value.