Not to intentionally steal the tag line from Randy Kahn's blog, but Are You Kidding Me?  How many times do we need to debate that keeping data forever is not beneficial to a company in almost any circumstance?

I read an article this week titled "A 'keep data forever' mentality could be beneficial for companies" (see article at this link).  This article referenced an Information Week blog (available here) that believed keeping data forever was being driven by the fact that businesses are under more burden through new regulations to keep ever increasing amounts of information for compliance and audits.  I challenge that any of these new regulations are telling a business they need to keep everything forever.  In my opinion, this is the easy way out from implementing good information management practices, driven largely by the storage vendors (and more recently by the cloud computing vendors).  It is sometimes being advocated by IT departments that believe this is an easier path to implement rather than than an Enterprise Content and Records Management program.

I've written previously that "Buy to Comply is not an Information Management Strategy", available at this link.  I don't disagree that we are creating more information every day that needs to be managed, as the IDC survey referenced in this blog entry points out.  That also doesn't mean we can't create a program to manage that ever increasing digital haystack.

I don't disagree with the Information Week blog entry that the technology to archive larger amounts of data is more viable than ever.  I also agree that accessibility to the current, relevant data is critical.  But why compound the problem of ever increasing volumes of data by keeping the information that you are no longer required to?

What those who advocate keep everything forever as a policy fail to include in the analysis is if your organization faces any litigation or audits, that data that you have kept forever will need to be searched and reviewed for any relevant information.  In the case of discovery during litigation, this is a totally unnecessary expense.  If the information was classified properly and disposed of per a retention policy, the data would not have to be reviewed.  And as long as you were following the applicable regulations and laws in how long you retained the information and were disposing of it in a documented and consistent fashion, you would not encounter any additional sanctions or fines for not having the information in your possession.

As Mary Hilliard pointed out on the Records Management Listserv where this particular article was being discussed among Records Managers, "The bigger the haystack, the more work for the farmers, (i.e. attorneys)...to winnow the wheat from the chaff."  And this is the totally unnecessary expense incurred if you keep everything forever.

As I pointed out in a previous blog post "Tilting at Windmills", this is not an unwinnable battle.  We can help your organization in this journey.  You don't have to keep data forever.