Compliance &Ethics - Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics

Featureby Mark DiamondSeven strategies for preventingusers from hoarding documents»»Employee hoarding of electronic documents is an information governance change management problem.»»Aggressive deletion often drives underground archiving, making the problem worse.»»Addressing underground archiving requires a cross-functional approach engaging policies, processes, tools, and technologies.»»Effective approaches create a “win” for employees by understanding the reasons for their behaviors.»»Ongoing auditing is critical to assess program effectiveness.DiamondHoarding of electronic information Many IT departments have found that justis a common problem that reduces devoting more storage to the problem is at bestemployee productivity, raises IT a temporary fix. It is true that the acquisition80% rate. 3 5% to 10% are deleters. Pilers tend to driveoperational expenses, and heightens the risksand costs of regulatory action and litigation.Organizations need to assert centralized controlof deletion in order to overcomethe consequences of informationhoarding. But such efforts can runinto resistance from employees.Most organizations let informationpile up. New information is likesnow, and legacy collections of datacost—but not the operating cost—of storage istrending downward. And “the cloud” offersmanageable costs and virtually unlimitedcapacity. Still, as the volume of informationgrows—and content repositories and managementsystems proliferate—problems crop up.Queries and searches can take longer, confidentialdata can fall into the wrong hands, andconsiderable effort may required to respond toeDiscovery requests or regulatory challenges.are like glaciers: each year, layers areadded, some melt away, but the accumulationkeeps growing.Why hoarding is an end-user problemSome people are “filers.” They classify information··The size of the digital universe in 2012is estimated at 2.7 zettabytes (2.7 trilliongigabytes), and is forecast to be 40zettabytes by 2020—a 50-fold growth sincethe beginning of 2010. 1(most often manually), and rely onfolder-based navigation to find what theyneed. Other people are “pilers.” They saveall of their documents on the desktop, inthe email inbox, or wherever they originally··Businesses sent and received 89 billionemails per day in 2012, which should growto over 143 billion by year-end 2016. 2reside, delete almost nothing, and relyon search to find important information.“Deleters” get rid of information as soon as it’s··Unstructured data (e.g., files, office productivitydocuments, SharePoint, and otherinformation generated by applications)in the enterprise is growing at up to andetermined to be of no use to them.We find that more than 50% of employeesin organizations of all sizes are pilers. A somewhatsmaller percentage are filers, and fromCompliance & Ethics Professional May/June 2013+1 952 933 4977 or 888 277 4977 www.corporatecompliance.org 25