Employees cyber lives causing computer overload
Detica, the business and technology consultancy, says the real culprits of corporate data overload are employees chatting over e-mail and sharing photographs of their personal lives - children, holidays and office parties
Detica claims companies are failing to identify the real culprit behind their lack of storage space and the huge volumes of data they are hoarding. Regulators and new compliance rules such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II are often blamed for huge data gluts, because they require companies to store more information.
Detica believes that this is actually a red herring – the real culprits of corporate data overload are employees chatting over e-mail and sharing photographs of their personal lives — children, holidays and office parties.
Detica's Head of Data Stewardship, Chris Saunders, says that staff communicating over email is one of the key factors in creating data excess: "In the Web 2.0 culture, we've stopped talking to one another directly — the norm is to communicate electronically, even to people just a few metres away from us in the office. E-mail is widely used for office banter, social chats and group discussions about after-work drinks, or to circulate large digital files with cartoon jokes, MP3 files or photographs.
"There may not be anything wrong with this in itself, but the data can quickly mount up — especially if teams are also emailing large project files (such as PowerPoint presentations) to each other every time they make a small change. Companies need to encourage their staff to delete junk emails and large, unnecessary or out-of-date files regularly from their personal data stores."
Saunders believes that companies can be missing a trick if they don't get employees on board with data management. Central to this is ensuring that employees are checking the shelf-life of the information they are storing and regularly deleting out-dated, duplicated or fragmented archived files. In fact, Saunders says that libraries are great examples of best practice in this type of information management.
Saunders concludes: "The good news is that, once you get your employees to understand the challenge and take responsibility for managing their own information hoards, not only will the performance of your servers be streamlined, but you'll get a more organised and up-to-date archive of data which can be used more effectively for business intelligence."
