Tom Hanks excels at illuminating our nation’s history, from John Adams to Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Bridge of Spies, Apollo 13, and Charlie Wilson’s War. Much of the impact springs from Hanks’ reverence for the primary source materials – the underlying records – that ground these compelling stories in the integrity of historical truth. So it was no surprise last month when the National Archives Foundation honored Hanks with The Records of Achievement Award, an annual tribute to an individual “whose work has cultivated a broader national awareness of the history and identity of the United States through the use of original records.”
Fidelity to the facts, as documented in public records, is neither a quaint notion nor a mere gimmick to sell movie tickets or HBO subscriptions. The integrity of our public institutions’ recordkeeping is an essential pillar of our democracy. And it’s in peril. Continue Reading The importance of records in a post-truth America
We’re addicted to information, but we can’t stand to think about it again once we’ve seen it, saved it, hoarded it. Why? We collect or create it in the moment, but have no thought or plan for its future. Even when it was once and briefly useful, neglected information soon becomes the effluvium of our digital landfills. And, like most landfills, the odor is disagreeable and no one wants to be near it.
bage in, garbage out” – we know that already, right? Well … what we know about information quality and what we do are not always in sync. Just for kicks, consider information quality through the lens of the industrial quality movement.
American architect Louis Sullivan, who coined the iconic phrase “form ever follows function,” was flat wrong – at least when it comes to the relationship of what we do and how we capture it with data. The reality is instead that the medium shapes the message, and that record-keeping alters the processes it records. Need a current example? One only has to consider how the President’s staccato bursts of tweets now drive public attention, media focus, and policy debates, both domestically and abroad.
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OK, IT mavens, listen up…how much better would your life be if you only had to manage and protect 20% of your company’s data? By eliminating 80% of your data you could free up oodles of storage, reduce licensing costs, shorten backup cycles, and drastically cut e-discovery preservation costs, not to mention go home on time for a change. For most this is an unrealistic pipe dream, but it doesn’t need to be. The trick is knowing which 20% to manage.
It lingers on – that vaguely guilty feeling that there’s something sanctionable, even illegal, about routinely destroying business data. That’s nonsense. It is well-settled United States law that a company may indeed dispose of business data, if done in good faith, pursuant to a properly established, legally valid data retention schedule, and in the absence of an applicable litigation preservation duty.
“What if ants were as big as dinosaurs?” I remember asking my kids that question, forever ago when they were young. Maybe the thought came from reruns of old monster movies, like the 1954 classic Them! (pictured here). Anyway, it was a cool game, for as the ant’s size multiplies, the laws of math, physics, and biology play their part:
There’s been a lot of news lately about “secret” messaging in government, including inside the White House and the EPA, and last week’s revelation that Vice President Pence conducted state business with a private email account while Governor of Indiana. So there’s lots of angst right now about under-the-radar communications. When you think about it, though, it’s really old news tied to new technology. The only difference is the growing sophistication of the tools in the last few decades. Old School: clandestine meetings in parking garages. New School: disappearing messages.