[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="350" caption="Over 6,000 attendees came to CA World this year!"]
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It's good to be back from CA World--what a great show this year! This year's attendees were enlightened on a range of topics from the "greening" of IT for greater sustainability to the impact and pain of our current economic chaos. A prevailing message that we all heard was that at the end of the day, all roads lead to the serious need for proactive information governance. Session presenters wove a cautionary tale that acknowledged even though your company may be feverishly scrambling to remain solvent, it is highly imprudent to ignore your obligations to remain compliant with legal regulations and laws. Both sides of the story must be honored to keep things on track and headed in the right direction.
On Monday night, Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, elaborated on these themes when he took the stage before a rapt audience. In his keynote, Mr. Welch encouraged us to consider the opportunities of this turbulent economy (yes, opportunities!); essentially that it is most definitely the time to buy if you have the resources. He echoed the prevailing message of "change" that has swept the country both during the presidential election and as we have watched our economy unravel. His message was this: embrace change with a fierce commitment to learning and innovation because if you do not the consequences could be dire.
There were many great Information Governance sessions, but one of the most interesting was a session given by Vivian Tero, who is Program Manager of Compliance Infrastructure at leading analyst firm, IDC. Based on recent quantitative research and in-depth interviews, Vivian presented on trends in Information Management. The growth to date of enterprise information is astounding, and the numbers projected forward are even more daunting. By 2011, IDC estimates an average of 32 exabytes of disk storage alone (an exabyte=one quintillion bytes!). Faced with that, more enterprises are tackling strategic decisions about information risk management"¦knowing what is essential for retention and applying scheduled deletion for what is not. While email gets the lion's share of attention in the media, Vivian's research shows that shared files (in collaboration systems, etc) are the most frequent files searched in eDiscovery. eMail in fact was number 3"¦which, she concluded, could simply be because lawyers setting the agenda for litigation today assume that email is already controlled and relatively "discoverable."
On Wednesday, Galina Datskovsky, senior VP and GM of the Information Governance team gave an amazing presentation (in the spirit of full disclosure, I report to Galina, but I would have thought that her session was amazing regardless!). Her IG Vision and Future Session, covered the intriguing new trend and critical need for companies to govern social networking content created by employees. Now, companies are not only responsible for applying governance practices to content created for the company. They are also feeling the pull to govern personal content created on social networking sites such as facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or even LinkedIn. This trend has clear implications that can impact both a company's reputation as well as the employees' standing in the company "“ depending on what they choose to post (or their choice in avatar pics!).
In summary, we know that while there are challenges and opportunities in the market and in technology, the greatest concentration of power to make technology succeed or fail still lies at our fingertips: the human beings designing the strategies and using the solutions.