By Vickie Wysokinski, VP of Sales,
CAS Severn, Inc. (Published January 19, 2006)
Each fall, the dawn of a new school year marks a new beginning
for students and teachers. And for a less tangible appendage of
every teacher in every school system around the country: each teacher’s
personal data trail which will follow him/her until their death.
Take Miss Davis, a mythical fresh-faced 25-year old tackling her
first 2nd grade class at U Learn Or Be Crushed Elementary. She giddily
fills out all her employment forms including enrollment into a state
retirement fund, a form that generates interest for a while then
lies dormant in storage – until seven years after her death!
Managing that single piece of data, multiplied thousands of times,
is the essence of a daunting technical problem best dealt with by
the practice of Information Lifecycle Management, or ILM. ILM is
not merely storage management in which data is stashed in the attic
for occasional reminiscence. It is a living, breathing process.
When Miss Davis was paying off her student loans, getting married
or starting a family, attention to that data was greater. In more
normal times, when she was moving along at a more relaxed pace,
ILM slowed down as well.
ILM had its origins as primarily a tiered-storage management technology
strategy, but it has evolved into a necessary technical undertaking
of how to more effectively manage business data throughout its lifecycle,
from cradle to grave, or from the advent of Miss Davis’ teaching
career to seven years after her death when her employer can finally
expunge her records.
ILM was developed on the premise that data has a lifecycle, like
our Miss Davis, and a relative business value that changes during
the lifecycle of the individual piece of data. For instance, a document
that needs to be constantly updated will generate more cost than
one that is archived for many years. Storage service levels, which
are directly related to business needs and are customized to each
business, govern performance, availability, recoverability and cost.
Now, Miss Davis’ information is in an active state during
the enrollment process, the retirement process and during the processing
of the final death benefits. Active data requires a high service
level and is best kept online for instant access. But for the majority
of the first 65 years of the data lifecycle, a just–in-case
(JIC) strategy should be employed to sufficiently satisfy the business
requirements.
JIC data is like an organization’s Plan B. It’s not
data that needs to be readily accessible, but it can’t be
erased either. Generally, JIC data can be stored with a lesser service
level with near-line media such as optical platters, tape or on
lower cost disks. However, the record’s retention policy is
to retain information until seven years after death, so for the
last seven years of the 72-year data lifecycle, the data is inactive.
At this dormant point in its lifecycle, data has a diminishing value
and should be archived offline with the expectation that it most
likely will not be accessed again until it is deleted and destroyed.
The evolution of ILM has been driven by profound legal and compliance
mandates, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, as well as DOD 5015.2,
that have forced organizations to seek guidance from their executive
and legal teams on developing records retention policies and business
processes for policy administration, compliance audits and legal
discovery. This has proven to be a very daunting task for most organizations
as all aspects of the business have been forced to not only work
together but also to better understand each other’s processes
and pain points. Consequently, companies are finding themselves
unprepared to respond to the growing business requirements related
to ILM because current business processes aren’t adequate
to support the data lifecycle needs of the business.
Today, many factors go into determining the relative value of data.
The type of data, how it was created, who created it, the need for
encryption or write-once-read-many (WORM) media, are all key factors
in determining how much a document is worth and how accessible it
needs to be. The data lifecycle is also a key factor - what business
processes use this data? How often and how quickly will it be needed
in the future? By analyzing both business processes and storage
costs, the information lifecycle of the data controls the appropriate
storage service level required for a specific type of data. Once
the “point in time” value of the data has been determined,
the appropriate service level for that data can be assigned.
ILM is not an off-the-shelf product, like database or accounting
software. ILM, driven by customized business requirements, is best
deployed by creating a central content management repository controlled
by integrated software that can provide the following key solution
components: Business Process Management, Content Management, Document
Management, E-Mail Management, Records Management and Storage Management.
For example, ILM’s integrated software would capture and
store Miss Davis’ enrollment forms in a content repository.
An approval process would then be initiated to complete the necessary
activities required to enroll the teacher into the retirement program.
During this process, several people may need to view the submitted
documents to verify their completeness. When this business process
is finished, the final step is to associate the teacher’s
electronic documents with a specific records lifecycle.
This lifecycle imposes a regulated policy governing the teacher’s
documents from her first day in a classroom to her last on earth.
While employed within the school system, the teacher may contact
the retirement agency via email. Through capturing and storing this
communication, this may allow the retirement agency to better respond
to the teacher as well as provide a level of protection to the retirement
agency in case a legal matter ever arose. At the event of a communication
that requires outbound correspondence, a document created by the
retirement agency may require several participants in the creation
of the final draft.
The days of using ILM strategies just to maximize storage resources
are over. Organizations have come to realize that ILM is not merely
for IT anymore - it has evolved into an enterprise-wide business
initiative that involves technology, people and processes. By deploying
ILM, companies can now reap very tangible business benefits such
as improved customer service, increased productivity and reduced
business process cycle time
.
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