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Kas Thomas

Green IT versus blue sky

12-Jan-2009

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Implementation, Information Architecture

In a new report, Gartner reportedly points to effective use of ECM as something that can help enterprises make IT greener. The idea is that by consolidating and centralizing information (content that might be duplicated in various places), you can reduce storage and energy costs.

It sounds good in theory. But it's an old (and by now largely discredited) theory -- the idea that with a single ECM repository you can centralize all your content and eliminate stovepiped-together silos, thereby enabling great efficiencies and (if we're to believe Gartner) staving off global warming.

If only the real world were that simple.

More and more these days, content lives at the edges of the network, on laptops and desktop machines and collaboration servers (and in SQL Server instances that support a group's SharePoint users), all across the enterprise. Silos now come in all sizes (and live in all kinds of places). And content itself is more protean than ever.

To be sure, not all content lives "at the edge." Some enterprises are (by nature) records-intensive and have to maintain central repositories. In that case, the "consolidate" mantra is already implemented in practice.

But in many outfits, content consolidation either makes no sense or isn't an option. In that case, if you're looking for a way to make IT greener, it seems to me you should start not by consolidating content but by rooting out dead content -- content that no one will ever consume, either because it's obsolete or unreachable. (This is what I've been calling the "dark matter" of the information universe.)

Well over 90 percent of the million or so files on my PC's hard drive are files I either haven't touched in years or will never access again. And yet the operating systems spends a lot of time indexing those files, scanning them for viruses, moving them around during disk defragmentation events, backing them up, maintaining access-control structures for them, and so on. Do I need most of these files? No. Am I spending time managing them? Yes. Does a similar situation exist with managed content in the enterprise? I'm convinced it does.

What can you do about the "dark matter" problem? First, try to find any zombie content that might be floating around in your system(s) right now. Start by looking for content that hasn't been accessed in years, or that has never shown up in an intranet search (if your search software can report such information), or that exists in a file format no longer used, contains "temp" in the pathname, or lives in a cache folder that's never been cleared out. (You can probably think of other heuristics.)

It may help to just ask people if they know of content that's not needed any more.

Most importantly, put a retention policy in place. Determine how long various categories of content need to be kept on hand. Assign files an expiry date. Then find a way to purge systems of "expired" content on an ongoing basis. (This is important not only from a resource management point of view but from a legal standpoint -- as I've discussed before.)

Will well-implemented ECM make the world a greener place? Somehow I doubt it. Nevertheless, energy spent managing content that's not going to be used is energy wasted. That much I know.