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Information has a lifecycle. It is created, changes, and finally is destroyed. ILM manages this lifecycle to optimize the use of resources, meet regulatory requirements, and ensure the integrity of the information. When a lifecycle has been developed for a class of information, it can be expressed as a series of policies. A General ModelThere is no set information lifecycle. Some products will impose a particular lifecycle on an organization, but ILM does not dictate this. An information lifecycle is dependent on the needs of an organization and the nature of the information. All information lifecycles can be derived from a general model (Figure 8-4). The model states that information is created, its state changes in some fashion, an action may occur due to that state change, and eventually it is destroyed. Creation is the initial action and destruction the final one Figure 8-4. The general case of the information lifecycleILM policy must define which state changes trigger actions and what those actions will be. Some changes that may trigger an action are
Changes in metadata or content represent a change in state. This in turn may trigger actions under ILM policies. This continues with changes in state and new actions until the last action possible is taken: destruction.
Life and Death of InformationWhat if Widget Corporation, a maker of high-quality widgets, is no longer happy with the results of its Data Lifecycle Management e-mail policy? Too often, e-mails that should be retained are not, and others that were supposed to be destroyed have not been. Now the company has angry customers and upset lawyers. The costs of storage and e-mail management continue to rise, though at a slower rate. The problem is not that Widget Corporation can't manage e-mails in general. What it cannot control, with the DLM policies in place, is information that doesn't fit the rules the company has set up. Widget Corporation has discovered, for example, that many employees in Sales copy e-mails into documents not covered by the e-mail policy. Conversely, many e-mails are destroyed, but not the original documents attached to the e-mails. The company also realizes that many customer e-mails really aren't important and should not be protected. Attention must be turned to what the e-mails mean to lower costs and better protect the company. Widget Corporation turned to ILM to solve some of these problems. The object "e-mail" is too coarse for Widget's purposes. Instead, e-mails and other documents must be classified, a lifecycle determined, and policies written. IT and Customer Service have decided that only three categories will be needed initially: Orders, Proposals, and Other. Classification is based on content, especially specific clues inside the e-mail text. Orders can be identified by the order number in the e-mail, for example. Other metadata items that IT and Customer Service feel are important to the ILM process are
With this in hand, Widget will be able to apply different levels of protection to different types of e-mails. Rules can be applied to attachments and their source documents (and vice versa). A history of changes in state will show when content and other metadata has changed. Finally, when it is time to make decisions about destroying e-mail, all copies and references to the e-mail can be considered in the decision-making process. |
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