In past posts, I floated the idea that many of us were in the process of becoming informationists rather than technologists.
If you're interested, you can see the background here and here.
One of the arguments behind this thought is simple: over time, there will be more business value in optimizing, protecting and enhancing the value of our information portfolios than our technology portfolios.
Ultimately, businesses care more about the information than the plumbing that got it there. And I'm always on the lookout for resources, discussions, etc. that help to support this thesis.
Once the informationist has the big picture, there are three basic jobs at hand:
- minimize costs associated with owning an ever-increasing amount of information
- ensuring that risks associates with information management are mitigated (protecting against loss, protecting againt unauthorized use, ensuring compliant retention, and so on)
- enhancing the value of the information portfolio through such activities as standardizing metadata, enabling new uses for existing information, and so on.
I was pleased to come across an organization that's trying to address at least a piece of the puzzle (aspects of information management risk mitigation), and that's ARMA (the Association of Records Management and Administrators).
They seem to have a great set of online resources for certain aspects of risk mitigation associated with information management: retention, compliance, regulatory, etc. You can find them here.
Although their roots appear to have grown in the world of physical information management, they're continually adding new content to help IT professionals understand how many of the concepts will need to apply in a digital world. The information looks rich enough to help you get a context behind the rules and regulations, which is where all the fun is.
Membership is $150. Looks to be a reasonable investment, given the wealth of content that's there. I'm going to join, and I'll try and pass along a few nuggets here over time.
It's certainly cheaper than paying a consultant to read the site and telling you what to do :-)
Turns out that Robin at Storagemojo.com has written about this as well, and has some links to some good quantitative information.
http://storagemojo.com/?p=307
-- Chuck
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | November 17, 2006 at 08:59 PM