What takes 1500 Lifetimes?

1500 Lifetimes

In a working world where we can create and save terabytes of data every day, we need a way to decide what data we should keep.

The dangers of keeping too much stuff is documented elsewhere, but the key to success is great information management.
But this is a bit dull for most of us.  It's a bit like telling teenagers to tidy their rooms.A good idea but ineffective.

In short the benefits of keeping the right stuff are;

Reduced risk of reputation damage to the organisation

• Improved knowledge sharing and cross team working
• Reduced costs of IT storage and security

I often see situations where people are not aware of their responsibilities and where record keeping disciplines have broken down or just don't exist.

Question - How do you engage staff with this dry as bones subject?

Answer - Making it easy to understand and engage with.

Here is how I do it.

What takes 1500 Lifetimes? Our Organisation stores 80,000 Gigabytes of email and personal data. An average 250 page novel is 3 Megabytes of data. This is equal to 26,500,000 novels. It takes 10 hours to read a novel. It would take 265,000,000 working hours to read all our data. This is more than 1500 working lifetimes. And we have just over 1000 employees

Issue your version of the above to the Board on a slow day. Ask two questions:

• Is it all needed?
• What is the risk of storing and securing this if no one is likely to use it?

That should get their attention.  The rest is Information Management.