Are You Saving Money With A Defensible Records Disposal Strategy?

Corporate data volume grew by about 50% last year and the budgets for that function grew by 0%, according to industry analysts. The explosion in data volume and diversity, including pipeline inspection documentation, is putting tremendous cost and control pressures on corporate information technology (IT) organizations.

When 40% or more of corporate data is not subject to a specific legal duty and has no business value – the capability to quickly identify this “digital waste” provides a compelling opportunity for IT groups to dramatically reduce costs and free up strategic IT investment dollars.

With flat budgets – and data volume growth estimated by one research firm to grow by a factor of 44 in the next 10 years1 - how will your organization invest in real-time information technologies that streamline planning, delivery and shipment?

How will you fund innovation with the latest 3-D pipeline inspection technologies?

How will you afford content management or data warehouse solutions needed to manage the 10,000+ pieces of preserved data mandated by the EPA?

Further - the revenue-generating business units likely need more storage and search tools so they can weed through the excess and find the right data to manage the business. All these projects are at risk if the budget is being consumed by excess data storage and information management expenditures.

Companies that can and do dispose of unnecessary information are able to return more profit to shareholders and use their IT budgets for strategic investments rather than managing digital waste.

Without a systematic, reliable way to determine the applicable legal obligations and value of data, to defensibly dispose of excess data, corporate IT departments typically adopt an extremely costly “keep everything” policy. Now more than ever, companies must invest in significant cost-reducing information governance “defensible disposal” processes.

Information Governance Defined
Information governance is the discipline of managing information according to its attendant legal obligations and its business value, enabling the defensible disposal of data and lowering the cost of legal compliance. Best practice has emerged that can guide corporate IT departments to a strategy of storing less and making more efficient use of IT resources.

A new study commissioned by the Compliance, Governance, and Oversight Council (CGOC) in concert with electronic discovery reference model (EDRM) and the new Information Management Reference Model project, assesses the challenges and how companies are addressing the problem.

CGOC members include executives from companies such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Devon Energy. This first-of-its-kind survey includes legal group, records group and IT group stakeholders from oil, gas and energy companies, as well as other industries such as life sciences, insurance, consumer goods and chemicals.

CGOC asked participants what they perceived as the benefits and barriers to better information governance and how well the traditional tools and processes worked. The study (available at www.cgoc.com) captures the essence of painful compliance and governance disconnects, and in particular, the disconnects among legal, records and IT practitioners within the same company. Given the data explosion that continues to occur in oil, gas and energy companies, its lessons are germane today for the pipeline industry.