The Brady Brief
Monthly Industry Trends & Insights from Colligo CEO Tim Brady
I recently returned from ARMA InfoCon in Savannah, where I had the opportunity to speak with information governance and records management professionals and present on the evolving role of email management in Microsoft 365.
As you might expect, AI was everywhere. But what struck me most wasn’t simply the level of interest in AI. It was how often the conversations came back to some very familiar questions.
What information should we keep? What should we delete? Where should important business information live? And, as the ways we communicate continue to multiply, what actually constitutes a record?
New technology may be changing the context, but many of the fundamental information management challenges remain the same.
Email deletion is moving up the agenda
One topic that stood out was email retention and deletion.
For a long time, the default approach in many organizations has effectively been to keep email indefinitely. That’s increasingly difficult to justify. Keeping everything creates unnecessary risk and leaves organizations with ever-growing amounts of information to manage.
But deciding to delete email is the easy part. Implementing a defensible deletion policy is considerably harder.
How long should email remain in Outlook? How do you make sure important business correspondence has been preserved before deletion? And how do you put a policy into practice without making it so disruptive that employees resist it?
There isn’t necessarily a single retention period that works for every organization. What matters is having a process that distinguishes between information that has ongoing business or records value and information that doesn’t.
That’s also why effective email management becomes more important, not less, when deletion policies are introduced. If something needs to be kept, employees need a straightforward way to move it from the mailbox into the appropriate system of record.
We’re hearing these questions often enough that we’re making them the focus of an upcoming Colligo webinar, Before You Delete: Email Retention Best Practices, where we’ll explore practical approaches to email retention and deletion.
AI interest is high. Adoption is another matter.
At the other end of the spectrum, enthusiasm around AI remains extremely strong.
But the conversations I had reinforced something I’ve observed elsewhere: interest in AI and meaningful adoption of AI aren’t necessarily the same thing.
One of the themes at the conference was the idea of “governed intelligence” and AI representing the next era of information governance. I think there’s something important in that idea.
The opportunity isn’t simply to deploy more AI technology. It’s to think carefully about the processes surrounding the information that AI depends upon.
That’s why I increasingly believe AI isn’t primarily about technology. It’s about process.
If organizations want useful results from AI, they need to understand how information is created, managed, stored, retained and ultimately disposed of. Information governance professionals have been asking those questions for years.
AI simply raises the stakes.
Questions such as Can we trust this information? Where did it come from? Who should have access to it? What should we retain? What can we safely dispose of? may not sound like AI questions, but increasingly they are.
Rather than making traditional information governance disciplines obsolete, AI is making them more relevant. Organizations need people who understand the relationship between information, process, risk and technology.
Governed intelligence requires governed information.
What counts as a record is still evolving
Another interesting discussion involved newer forms of workplace communication, particularly chat and messaging.
Opinions vary. Should these communications generally be considered transitory, or can a chat or message constitute an important business record?
I don’t think the interesting part is finding one answer that applies universally. It’s recognizing that the way we communicate has changed considerably while the underlying governance question remains.
While email remains the primary source of records entering an organization, communications are spreading across more channels. Therefore, organizations need clear principles for identifying what has continuing value and ensuring that information is appropriately managed.
Again, the technology changes. The underlying question doesn’t.
The fundamentals still matter
I came away from Savannah encouraged by the interest in AI and the opportunities it presents for information governance and records management professionals.
But I was equally struck by how many of today’s conversations come back to the fundamentals.
AI may represent the next evolution of information governance. But getting there doesn’t mean abandoning the disciplines we’ve developed over the years – and in fact, can serve as the catalyst for additional information governance projects.
If anything, it makes getting those fundamentals right more important than ever.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Colligo. Think of them as ‘strong opinions, loosely held.’ Proceed with curiosity and a sense of humour!