What is information lifecycle management? It is the practice of applying certain policies to effective information management. This includes every phase of a record from its beginning to its end. And while it is generally applied to information that fits the classic definition of a record, it applies to any and all informational assets. This interesting topic came to us from the Ottawa Business Journal in their article, “Classification as the Foundation for Information Lifecycle Management.”
Document management solutions were meant to simplify things. Unfortunately they have never been able to capture all the unstructured data being shared both around the office and between organizations. Enter the cloud. Now ensuring that all corporate records are input into the content repository becomes a greater challenge. But again, there is help. Data classification provides many of the tools necessary to properly govern information wherever it resides.
Identification of data should begin immediately when the file is created to ensure the identity is not lost when the file is shared or moved. Identifying attributes, such as classification, can be applied as persistent metadata.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
