Why We are Moving to A World Where We Will Keep Everything Forever

The following is an condensed and edited transcript of a speech I recently gave about the future of information. Audio and the presentation itself is embedded above.

Anyone who is familiar with the Information Governance Initiative knows our singular focus on information governance. We spend our days trying to give dimension to how professionals are thinking about information governance, where they are spending their money and what they are actually doing with all the information that’s gather on a daily if not hourly basis. But instead of focusing on the state of information governance today it’s more important to ponder the future of information governance and the future of information as a whole. And it’s not only about how much data we amass but how we as professionals and we as organizations interact with that information.

It’s easy to analogize between the prevailing traditional view of records and information and modernist architecture. Today we like to think about records as these fixed things that are clear and predictable, similar to modernist buildings that have clean lines and an obvious esthetic. We want to treat our records as these special things that we’re going to put in a box, a museum, or perhaps even a mausoleum. Once it checks in, it never checks out. Consider what the UK National Archives, one of the high churches of records management and archiving, has to say on this. To them the purpose of records is to create a perfect memory of our business that we can refer to. That is exactly how we view the act of saving, retaining and managing our information.

That may have been the prevailing reality but it doesn’t exist anymore. We’re not in a modernist world, we’re in a postmodernist one and the data is a postmodernist building. So what does that mean? It means data isn’t neat and clean. It’s twisted, crazy, dynamic and unpredictable. It draws from multiple sources. The whole metaphor of putting our data in a box, whether it’s a physical one or a virtual one is no longer relevant. Nor does it capture the information we have in our world, how it’s created and the way it flows.

We need a new analogy for information and the one I like is comparing information to a river. If you think about data as a river than you can see ideas start up high in the mountains of our brains, at the top of organizations or throughout the organization. Information starts as rivulets and as it gains steam it become streams, creeks and rivers and the information flows throughout the organization. This river is always flowing and we can’t stop it. Our job isn’t to stop it. Our job is to capture it and to harness that information for the betterment of our organization. In fact that’s the highest value we can provide as information governance professionals.

The point of storing all of this stuff, the point of trying to manage this stuff better, isn’t so we can create a perfect record of the past. It’s so we can understand the future. It’s so that we can use our own information and the things we’ve generated as a business to be better in the future, whether it’s to sell more product, get into a new market or to compete. That’s why we have this information.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few years is the battle that’s emerging. On one side is the big data world. It’s a world defined by taking vast pools of data, putting it on an Internet scale infrastructure, pointing powerful analytical tools at it and gaining insights about the world. That world is being funded by the billions of dollars. On the other side you have the risk world, the compliance world, the records management and e-discovery world. In our world we do not believe that all data is good and more data is better. We see the world through a very different lens.

The question we all have to ask ourselves is, who is going to win that battle? Who has more money? Are Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google going to shape this? Do you really think they want us to throw information away? Doubtful. I believe we’re moving to a world where we will keep everything forever. It’s a fundamental shift happening that we ignore at our peril. We have to pay attention and we need to decide what our value is in this new world.

Last month Google Apps announced Google infinite space. You don’t need to think about how much storage you have in Google Apps. You can run your entire business on it and storage never needs to enter the equation. Pivotal, the builder and maintainer of so-called data lakes, announced on its website you can store everything you want, without limit, for free. What you pay for is the analysis. What does this say? Store everything. All your data types, not just structured data. The cost of storage is effectively being driven down to zero. Or perhaps, more accurately, the cost is becoming invisible. It’s becoming built into the cost of the services that we buy to run our businesses and to run our lives.

The world is moving in the direction where it doesn’t care if we get rid of stuff. That doesn’t mean that IG professionals and others don’t have value in this world. In fact the value of information professionals only increases because of our ability to understand, use and categorize that information.

So how do we position ourselves for value? One of the platforms we advanced in our annual report, which I think is at the center of what we will focus on over the next year, is the concept of the Chief Information Governance Officer. I realize there’s many of you reading this thinking the last thing we need is another C-level executive. The Chief Privacy Officer didn’t exist ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, but today if you’re a certain kind of company at a certain size, of course you should have a Chief Privacy Officer. The one thing a C-level executive does is it puts the emphasis in the right place. Without it information governance cannot be done. We can chip around at the edges, but information governance, at least the vision that we articulate as the IGI, cannot be done without senior-level support and there’s no role at the C-level today that is a good fit.

In our survey data, just 28 percent told us they’ve delegated overall accountability for information governance to a specific person, and about 38 percent have information governance in their title. The Chief Information Governance Officer position is a coordinating function, but with specific delegated authority. In some cases that delegated authority might mean the Chief Information Governance Officer is engaged in records management or it could mean he or she is involved with discovery. Ultimately it may be the things we most closely associate today with information governance.

In our vision the Chief Information Governance Officer will also have a different kind of authority over other aspects of information across the organization. The question then becomes, what authority does a Chief Information Governance Officer have? That’s part of the dialogue we need to have in the coming weeks and months. It’s useless to create an empty suit. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a role that has specific delegated authority and a budget. At the IGI, we’re going to produce, through our community, a job description and other details around the Chief Information Governance Officer. We’ve seen in our benchmarking interviews a good number of companies who I believe have people already playing this role without the title. I fully expect over the next year we’ll see this title continue to emerge and lead us into this new reality that we’re facing in this profession.