If you ever want to cure yourself of the notion that you live a simple life, move.
We moved this week into a new home. We love the house, the yard, and the space. It’s a little bigger than the last house, but not excessive and will provide a great place for the kids, grandchildren and friends to come and visit.
Based on how stiff I feel right now, I am convinced that I own too much stuff.
As I was getting ready to come to work this morning (Has anyone seen my black shoes?), I started thinking about how much electronic “stuff”, like data, emails, and files that are collected and filed away. I would say my collection of physical stuff that I lifted and toted these past few days pales in comparison to my electronic collection.
Storage is cheap now. Futureshop is advertising a 2Tb drive for under $100. While this is a consumer product, commercial storage is getting less expensive all the time. Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, AVG and others are giving away storage in the cloud. From an enterprise perspective, having the availability of secure, scalable storage in the cloud is enticing.
The potential to collect electronic “stuff” is at an all time, affordable high.
As the old adage goes, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should“.
Many organizations have developed (or are starting to develop) retention policies for electronic information. The paper based files usually have well documented policies and practices, but the practices and policies for electronic documents and data are just now coming into play. If your organization has been on the wrong end of the eDiscovery process in a court case, you know how high the legal bills can grow when all electronic information can be subject to discovery. Having solid policies and practices (the two go hand in hand) can represent a real savings.
If you are the Chief Information Officer of your organization, this responsibility falls directly in your purview. How much time have you devoted to this area of responsibility?
I’ll be blogging more about this topic, and will dig up some great resources to start your journey, but now I’m going to go find some liniment for these stiff muscles.
While I'm currently the CIO for Appleby College in Oakville (the best IT job in Canada), I've had a great ride in a number of positions in various locations. I've lead a team of more than 100 staff at Sheridan supporting a constituency of 50,000 users, I've been part of the founding team building a brand new medical school in Northern Ontario based completely around distributed education, I've started 3 companies, consulted internationally, drove my gorgeous wife crazy moving around all over, raised 2-1/2 great kids (I'll round it up when the final one leaves home), and occasionally scratch the ear of our butt ugly dog. My craft is not IT, but building IT organizations that support challenging and new ways to do things. I am utterly convinced that we as IT leadership need to dramatically change how IT is delivered, before we get relegated to a costly overhead department. In the midst of all this fun, I've had the distinction of being awarded the inaugural 2010 IT Leader of the Year (SME) Award from Computerworld Canada for my work at Appleby College. I'm humbled by the honor and thankful that some of my ideas actually make sense to someone.
