In a previous post, Dark Data: Shedding Light on a Growing Problem for Businesses, I pointed the spotlight on the problem organizations have with huge volumes of unused and forgotten digital information. We discussed recognizing the existence of dark data, dealing with its challenges and avoiding the potential pitfalls. Interestingly, a new trend has emerged. Businesses are starting to recycle their dark data by harnessing best-in-class enterprise content management (ECM) solutions.
The current business climate requires more thorough record keeping and the ability to produce evidence for quality control, compliance, legal actions, risk mitigation, and more. Employees, as a result, tend to keep everything, and hence the huge groundswell of unused information. “Content chaos” now plagues many businesses and organizations. Employees are spending more time organizing their information, and yet end up wasting time searching for misplaced or lost information.
Instead of ignoring the surge in dark data and accepting content chaos as inevitable, businesses need to develop the ability to identify and efficiently manage information at all phases of the lifecycle. Some data should go dark; once it has served its purpose, it can be archived appropriately based on retention rules, to simplify any future discovery requirements.
Discerning Data in the Dark
The identification of legitimate dark data allows it to remain visible, such that it can be managed to avoid any associated risks. For example, if the dark data contains sensitive information about employees or confidential activities, it can be encrypted and protected with access restrictions.
Learning to recognize truly dark data also involves learning to recognize information that should be kept alive. An ECM solution that supports metadata can greatly simplify the classification and identification of dark data and active assets. Content can be tagged in a manner that creates relationships between various types of information, and keeps collective assets more visible within relevant categories of searches. The new emerging text analytics and machine learning technologies assist in auto-classifying content based on the contents of it. This is a great help as curating metadata manually is often an exercise that no one really has time to do.
Smarter, Greener Data
Injecting more intelligence in your data essentially makes it greener – the assets live longer and can be used by more people. In many cases, dark data never stays dark for long, since it can be regularly recycled for uses that go beyond the original intent. This reuse of data gives businesses huge gains in efficiency, as industry surveys cite that up to 70% of documentation is re-created at some point.
The benefits and saved time add up quickly. Decision makers can achieve better results since they can find and use all relevant information, and productivity goes up for all of the knowledge workers in the organization since everyone will spend less time looking for misplaced information.
As an impetus for introducing enterprise-wide improvements like these, dark data can be a positive phenomenon at present. And by recycling data, today’s intelligent ECM solutions might soon eliminate the need for the term, “dark data.”
If you are interested in learning more, check out my recent article for Security News Desk.
