Information Governance is Not a Fad: Why the
‘Keep Everything Forever’ Approach Won’t Fly
The ranks of the information governance (IG) community are stirring. A debate is taking place. Recently
there has been a concept floated by some thought leaders in IG which contends that we are moving to a
world where we retain all information—forever.
Some even contend that IG is just a fad and advances in search technology will soon eliminate the need
for IG. The arguments go something like this:
1. Yesterday’s trash may be tomorrow’s treasure: We won’t know what data has value until well
into the future. Today, we do not have the construct to understand what relevant insights,
patterns, or trends may be hidden in the data that, as business conditions change, may be
valuable in the future;
2. We don’t want to get caught deleting something that regulators or superiors may look for in the
future;
3. It is time-consuming, expensive, and politically charged to attempt to delete large collections or
categories of data, e-documents and information, and, just not worth the effort from an ROI
standpoint;
"Freedom ain't free. And neither is storage."
4. The cost of storage is effectively being driven down to zero with cloud offerings that offer lowcost storage upfront, and big companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google will win this
argument in the marketplace;
5. Search technologies will be so good in a few years that classifying information and having a
metadata strategy in place is pointless.
On their face, the arguments seem to come together. Things are going that way and technology trends
are making it easier to keep everything forever, so why bother?
The argument holds up until it is brought out from the shadows of the theoretical to the realities of
conducting business and day-to-day operations.
Why won’t the “keep everything forever” paradigm work? Here’s why, from a practical standpoint:
1) Culture – For executive management, the “keep everything” paradigm sets a poor professional tone
in an organization. Retaining all information—no matter how useless--doesn't make business sense.
Why would you keep copies of copies, copies that are renamed, empty spreadsheet or word processing
files, temporary log files, personal emails, illicit files like personal pictures, music, and video and the
rest of the worthless information filling up storage space? Yesterday's trash is tomorrow's trash. And it
sets a bad example. It says that your organization is willing to just add storage, suffer sanctions, lose
lawsuits, and pay fines rather than deal with IG issues. Not focusing on policies and rules for governing
information encourages a sloppy operational culture fraught with inefficiencies. It is the opposite of
what leading organizations strive for: continued improvements in operational efficiency. In a recent