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Businesses survive or die based on decisions made on information available to them, and yet the majority of organizations have little control over the growing mountains of information that they create on a daily basis.  On top of the formal data being created by database-centric applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, more and more of an organization’s intellectual property is being created as ad hoc information held in documents created by individuals in Microsoft Office or other mainstream desktop applications.

To make matters worse, there are the increasing pressures of governance and audit, where the ability to show exactly how a process happened, what the outcomes were and to be able to demonstrate that such information is being kept according to the various legal and other compliance requirements placed upon us is becoming more important.  Historically, organizations have looked to discrete but interlinked solutions, mainly underpinned by enterprise content management (ECM).  However, ECM systems are generally aimed only at managing information that has already gone through several stages of a document’s creation process and has already been agreed to have considerable business value held within it.  On top of the ECM system lie all the business intelligence and reporting systems, along with all the main tools aimed at audit and governance. 

To the rescue comes information lifecycle management (ILM), the means to managing all the information utilized within an organization. Or not, as the majority of ILM systems miss the point completely. Many systems don’t deal with the complete, end-to-end lifecycle of the document – an obvious problem considering the name vendors have given to the solution itself. If concentration on is only on controlling the aging, archival and disposal of information that has already reached a certain level of importance within an organization, the point has been missed.  This approach misses out on the wealth of hidden information held by individuals and small groups that has not reached the more formal storage environments.  Information that is still being worked upon, either as the sole ownership of an individual or by a group of people as a collaborative, peer review environment.  This information may hold the key to whether a decision is a yes or a no, and yet it rarely gets to be seen by the decision-maker due to the lack of tooling available.

However, trying to comprehensively control all information from first thought to end of life would require far too much tooling, storage that would grow out of control and require more technical skills than are currently available in the market. So how can an organization approach the issue of enterprise ILM?

First, the problem needs to be cut down into chunks. For this, take a four-step approach. Starting from the personal environment where an individual begins work on an idea, moving to Peer, where a group of individuals work together to critique and refine an idea, then onto to Published, where the output is made more widely available within an organization, and finally to  Public, where the output is made available to the widest group of all.  Each stage has its own issues that need to be addressed, and yet each stage needs to be able to interact successfully with the others.

The Personal Stage

Within an organization, much of the information held is of little consequence.  Emails between employees are more often personal or about issues that have little or no importance to the business rather than anything strategic or covering areas of intellectual property. Many documents started by individuals get no further than an outline, as the writer realizes that the content is not important enough or as he finds other information that contradicts the original idea. However, the first sparks of intellectual property will be coming from the individual – and we need to ensure that the information is managed correctly.