Buzz Word or Better?

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

Recently, a number of major vendors including EMC Corporation and IBM have embraced a new term around information management called "information lifecycle management." ILM involves setting policies around management of data, assessing the value of the data throughout the enterprise and providing tools and a tiered storage environment to manage that data effectively and cost efficiently.

The concept itself is not something I would call novel, as I believe that intuitively all IT professionals recognize the need for ILM. We recognize that if data is used sporadically but needs to be kept that an archival layer is necessary. We recognize that data that can be disposed should be deleted. And we recognize that within an application context, data which is more frequently accessed is put into separate tables that make queries perform much more effectively.

While these things are all conceptually inherent in our mental frame, in practice they have been poorly executed. Data that should be archived is not; data that should be deleted is saved; and data that is highly accessed is seldom given differentiation than less accessed data. If you layer on top of that the declining cost of storage, you have ended up with an IT community that generally has had a malaise over implementing robust information management policies and processes over the last few years.

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