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.
Even the courts themselves dispose of their data. Federal courts are required by U.S. law to follow a retention schedule approved by NARA, and to ultimately destroy records or transfer them to the Federal Records Center, as directed by that retention schedule.
Here are but a few of the many case decisions on this point:
Continue Reading Why govern your information? Reason #6: It’s OK to destroy your data.
“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.
It happens every day. A company spends a huge amount of money on a new technology system, without fully addressing the 
As the information tide relentlessly rises, many organizations simply see an IT problem, to be fixed with a purely IT solution – more storage capacity, more tools, or both. But merely adding more storage is a reaction, not a strategy. And adding technology tools without the right governance rules invariably makes things worse, not better.
I put off writing this post for months, because I found the April news item so profoundly disturbing. But as I reflect on the past year, now that 2016 has finally come to a close, it strikes me that one detail of this news story metaphorically captures a deep and troubling problem in our technology-fueled, dysfunctional relationship with information.
The “business case” for information governance often focuses solely on quantifying specific costs for data management and exposures for