I was reading a blog posting today pointed out on Twitter (thanks to Mark Miller at EUSP) titled "SharePoint is Causing Information Management Problems."  The article was pointing out how information in dead SharePoint project sites is basically lost to the organization.

Tim Jennings, Research Director for Ovum, pointed to two customer surveys of European IT decision-makers that showed firms were deploying SharePoint for business collaboration without any forethought about information governance around the technology.

That doesn't sound like SharePoint is causing the Information Management problems.  It is how the technology platform is being implemented and governed that is causing the Information Management problems.

I've previously posted Ten Things about SharePoint Governance, pointing out the things that need to be included in an overall governance plan for SharePoint.  AIIM has an e-book that you can download that discusses the things you need to know before implementing SharePoint (details available at this link).

There needs to be some discussions before a site is established about what happens to the information in SharePoint once a collaboration project ends.  Are there records (i.e. evidence of business transactions) buried in the content that need to be captured?  Is there some corporate knowledge that needs to be added to a lessons learned database or other knowledge management application?  If the information is no longer of any value to the organization, it needs to be disposed of according to the Records Retention Policy so the information doesn't become a liability in the future because of unplanned litigation.

You can't blame your ERP system for not providing the reports you need to support decision making if the chart of accounts is not set up correctly.  You also can't blame SharePoint (or any other ECM technology) for causing Information Management problems if you haven't established the rules for its usage.  If you don't have a decommissioning process that is part of overall information governance in place, then you will have Information Management problems.  But SharePoint isn't the problem.