As you know, we recently published the five central videos from our interview series, “5 Questions About Information Governance in 5 Minutes.” In this series, we asked 30 IG experts a number of definitional and serious questions about IG. Our experts were prepared for that. However, right at the end of the interview, I slipped in one surprise question. Since many of our interviewees have experience with records management, and records management isn’t known as the most light-hearted, spontaneous profession , I thought I would ask, “What’s your favorite records management joke?”

So that’s what I did. I love this video because it shows that this community has a great sense of humor and does not take itself so seriously –  a sure sign of health.

Next week we will be posting full interviews with each interviewee as well. You can also check out the six videos we have published so far on our YouTube channel.

And by the way, if you know any good records management jokes, please send them to me, or add them in the comments.

Tagged: ARMA, comedy, compliance, defensible deletion, E-Discovery, humor, Information Governance, Information governance videos, information technology, interview series, records management, records management joke, speaking, video

Today (February 21st, 2013) is the first annual Global Information Governance Day. This special day was created as an international celebration of all things information governance. Through establishing and recognizing Global Information Governance Day, we hope to raise awareness of information governance across the globe. See the Wikipedia entry for more information on this important day.

As we define it, information governance is a comprehensive program of controls, processes, and technologies designed to help organizations maximize the value of information assets while minimizing associated risks and costs.

Success in information governance can only be achieved by challenging and changing the way we see information. This is why Global Information Day is important: it will help to raise awareness of the critical importance of information governance.

As you celebrate Global Information Governance Day with your friends and family, here are some key points to remember:

1. Most companies (and individuals) create and and store an enormous amount of digital junk.
2. Over half of the information many organizations create and keep is redundant, outdated junk.
3. Keeping this digital junk around only wastes capital that could be deployed elsewhere – to create jobs, for example – and unnecessarily harms the environment through massive electricity waste.
4. The global failure to manage burgeoning digital information is a demonstrable threat to the civil and criminal justice system due to the out-of-control costs of electronic discovery. Many cases and investigations are settled rather than properly adjudicated simply because the cost of finding and producing digital evidence is unreasonably high.
5. The global failure to properly classify unstructured information is represents a growing threat to individual privacy. Every day your private information and mine is at risk of theft and unauthorized disclosure by the companies and governance agencies because they lack consistent and cost-effective techniques to separate personally identifiable information from non-private information.

How can you celebrate Global Information Governance Day? Here are some ideas:

• Chip away at your email inbox to try and achieve Inbox Zero.
• Clean up and shut down an old departmental shared drive, just for fun.
• Take your IT department out for a drink and find out where the legacy information bodies are really buried.
• Drink some herbal tea, read Zen Buddhism for Dummies, and try not to panic when you think about how big the problem is at your organization.
• Take six or seven hours and try to explain to your friends and family, what exactly do you do for a living again anyway?
• Participate in the first annual Global Information Governance Day Twitter chat.

In honor of Global Information Governance day, I will be participating in a Twitter chat at 11 am EST on February 21, 2013 with several other information governance experts. Click here for more information, and I hope to see you there.

Author: Barclay T. Blair

Tagged: Garth Landers, Global Information Governance Day, holiday, Nuix, RSD, Tamir Sigal

Continuing my quest to educate readers about all things information governance, I bring you my new InfoGraphic illuminating a key concept in Big Data: The Internet of Things. You are very welcome.

 

Author: Barclay T. Blair

I have been doing some research into the origin of the animal drive to cache (generally healthy) or hoard (generally not healthy) things, especially important things like food or information. I am specifically interested in the evolutionary roots of this behavior, and also what it looks like when it goes wrong. Reality television fans are of course intimately familiar with hoarding thanks to shows like TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive and A&E’s Hoarders (with A&E presumably elevating the “E” in its name above the “A” with this show). Currently, “hoarding” as a psychiatric condition is officially a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, but thanks to a coming revision of the standard psychiatric diagnostic manual, it is getting an entry all its own in 2013 (is reality TV now actually creating reality?).

My working hypothesis is that organizational information hoarding behavior is almost indistinguishable from individual object hoarding behavior. After all, organizations are merely collections and reflections of individuals.

Is this true? Well, lets take a look at the newly proposed “working diagnostic criteria for compulsive hoarding” and do a kind of search and replace exercise to see if the criteria also illuminate organizational disfunction around information retention and management.

Working Diagnostic Criteria For Compulsive Hoarding (of Information)

#	Diagnostic Criteria for Compulsive Hoarding Proposed for DSM-V	Diagnostic Criteria for Corporate Information Hoarding Proposed by Me
A	Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with personal possessions, even those of apparently useless or limited value, due to strong urges to save items, distress, and/or indecision associated with discarding.	Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with information, even information of apparently useless or limited value, due to strong urges to cover one’s ass, paper the file to catch your manager in a lie, and give e-discovery review attorneys something to do.
B	The symptoms result in the accumulation of a large number of possessions that fill up and clutter the active living areas of the home, workplace, or other personal surroundings (e.g., office, vehicle, yard) and prevent normal use of the space. If all living areas are uncluttered, it is only because of others’ efforts (e.g., family members, authorities) to keep these areas free of possessions.	The symptoms result in the accumulation of a large volume of information that fill up and clutter active information systems. If information systems are uncluttered, it is only because of others’ efforts (e.g., family members, sleep-deprived paralegals, “accidental” overwriting incidents) to keep these areas free of information.
C	The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (including maintaining a safe environment for self and others).	The symptoms cause economically significant distress or impairment of business functions.
D	The hoarding symptoms are not due to a general medical condition (e.g., brain injury, cerebrovascular disease).	The information hoarding symptoms are not simply due to generally half-assed company management techniques (e.g., incompetent CEO, brother-in-law of CEO running IT).
E	The hoarding symptoms are not restricted to the symptoms of another mental disorder (e.g., hoarding due to obsessions in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), lack of motivation in Major Depressive Disorder, delusions in Schizophrenia or another Psychotic Disorder, cognitive deficits in Dementia, restricted interests in Autistic Disorder, food storing in Prader–Willi Syndrome).	The hoarding symptoms are not restricted to the symptoms of another organizational disorder (e.g., Big Data Kool-Aid Drinking, Overly Broad Legal Holditis, Keep Everything Forever Spectrum Disorder).

Tagged: defensible deletion, hoarding, information hoarding

Fascinating story today from David Galbraith, trying to track down the precise geographical location where Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet. Was it at his office, and if so, was his office in France or Switzerland (the CERN campus straddles the border)? Was it at his house in France, or a place he lived temporarily in Switzerland? Read all about it here.

The timing of the piece was great, as just last night I came across the autograph that Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave me near the beginning of my career. In 1999 – when XML was still shiny and new –  I wrote a paper about XML’s role in secure electronic documents. The W3C (web standards organization) published the paper and invited me to present it at the 8th Annual World Wide Web conference in Toronto (along with co-author John Boyer, a key player in the development of XML standards). It was a big moment in my career. After my session, I saw Sir Tim standing in the back of a session, and approached him for an autograph. I find asking for an autograph – something I have done only a few times (Johnny Bench as a kid, recently, Muhammed Ali) – an emotionally complex experience, with competing feelings of shame, vanity, timidity, and brashness; but with the genetic handicap of being a polite Canadian acting as white noise behind the whole damn emotional cacophony.

In any case, Sir Tim was great, and it was a real treat to meet him.

Here’s his autograph, on the inside cover of the conference proceedings book.

Since I scanned the page, I have I had been puzzling over what the writing above his name reads. Did I get someone else’s autograph at the conference too? If so, who was it? I don’t remember any other encounters. What were the letters, and what did they mean?  Had Sir Tim not invented the Web, this may have become a lifelong mystery. However, a quick trip to Google (feeling a little silly typing the seemingly random letters, “KUTGW”) instantly revealed that it was – of course – an acronym for Keep Up The Good Work. The answer was so obvious in hindsight that my brain immediately forgot that I used Google to come up with the answer and decided to give itself all the credit.  A couple more searches for “Tim Berners-Lee autograph” (hint, hint, SEO gods) revealed that he has used this inscription elsewhere, so I’m pretty confident that’s what it reads.

So if Sir Tim Berners-Lee had not invented the Web, I would not have been able to use Google to decipher his inscription. But, if he hadn’t invented the Web, I would never asked for his autograph in the first place. Whoa, dude, that is excellent. Okay, okay I am going to stop right now before I cause an irreparable ripple in the fabric of time itself and create an alternate reality where litigation is primarily a battle over who has failed at information governance least horrifically, and is no longer about fact-finding, truth-discovering and justice-doing. Hey, wait a minute . . .