Information Lifecycle Management. An oldish term that seems to be coming back into style. But what does it really mean? The best definition I found was from SearchStorage and states that Information Lifecycle Management is a comprehensive approach to manage the flow of an information system’s data and associated metadata from creation and initial storage to the time when it becomes obsolete and is deleted Ok, I’ll buy that.
What makes this an interesting topic is how times have changed. Many documents are still in paper format, but typically they can be scanned and placed on the storage site automatically. But many organizations still manually scan, fax, or even copy and mail documents for processing. Hmmmm. An approach with a high degree of potential failure.
In today’s technology environment, information lifecycle management must address multiple channels and origination points to process documents correctly. Effective information lifecycle management today must have the ability to process documents from a variety of sources, and gain the benefits from not only end user productivity, reduced costs, and produce an audit trail to ensure compliance and security. Ok, that can probably be accomplished. But the crux of the matter goes back to metadata. Information cannot be managed from inception to deletion without comprehensive metadata associated with the content.
The lack of quality, meaningful, non-subjective metadata always seems to rear its ugly head.
So what about information lifecycle management? Is this a priority? Have you implemented an approach that works? How have you addressed the accuracy of metadata and have any problems surfaced from the lack of comprehensive metadata?
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