Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the lightning round of information governance. We will discuss how do you would we did we should you Over a variety of interesting topics today it's should you keep everything forever? As a continuation to our records retention schedule creation method.
Hello, welcome to what Counts. Every organization hides a story in their data. This is a podcast that digs deep into the information governance people inherit, ignore and discover too late. I'm Lee and as always, this is my co host, Maura Dunn. Maura, Keep everything forever. Why not?
[00:00:38] Speaker B: I mean, sounds easy, doesn't it?
[00:00:40] Speaker A: It does. And the first thing people say is, well, there's plenty of storage. Storage is cheap, right? So why not?
[00:00:48] Speaker B: People do say that.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: I think that's just, you know, if you keep it, then you it's discoverable. I mean, we get into problems here with when. Why when keeping things forever become a problem, right?
[00:01:02] Speaker B: So storage is not the deciding factor, right? That is the cost of storage is not the deciding factor. Finding things might be part of it. Because there is a cost to that for sure.
There is a cost to that on a daily basis. If you can't find the right thing because there are multiple versions out there and you have no idea where they came from or which one is the right one, the most recent one, that's a daily cost in terms of time, and it can be a much more costly impact. If you find the wrong thing, make a decision, send it out, try to build on it, and then your counterparty, for instance, says, no, we decided, not
[00:01:47] Speaker A: even on the right version.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: Not even on the right version. Maybe we don't want to be in business with you. Or, oh, you thought about this problem and then you didn't tell anybody about this problem.
You had some data that said your choices were bad and you didn't let, you didn't put that out into the public, that's a problem for you.
So keeping everything forever is deceptive. It seems like an easy way out, but in fact the cost to it is huge.
So you have the problem of looking for it, you have the problem of finding and sharing the wrong thing. You have the risk, the much heightened risk, just based purely on volume, of a data breach. What happens in the event of a data breach? Can you protect everything? And if you do have a data breach, how many more things have been released there that you could have gotten rid of, should have gotten rid of, and therefore, how much more is it going to cost you to get beyond this data breach? And then there's the last one that you mentioned, which is it's discoverable in the event of an audit or a litigation, you would have to produce everything that's out there, which brings all the pieces together. You have to go look for it, which is going to cost you.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: And you have to pay. Right, Exactly. You have to pay for somebody to review all that information, even though you might not even needed it.
Right.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: Even though you could have, if you'd done a retention schedule and followed a retention schedule, you could have gotten rid of it. But now that you didn't get rid of it, you have to pay to review it, you have to pick it, you have to go find it. If it's in a format that isn't as readily accessible anymore, you have to pay to convert it. And whatever it says, if it hurts you, too bad, you have to disclose it as part of the discovery, because you do still have it. So. So keeping everything forever sounds easy on the front end. Definitely. Much more risky, much more costly in the long run.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Well. And privacy laws are continuously saying that you should get rid of data a lot more quickly as well.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Yes.
And depending on the law, you may get requests where you have to produce all the information that you're holding about a person and delete it, destroy it, be able to state with certainty that you destroyed it.
And if not, you're open to more lawsuits, more potential trouble that way.
But I think the biggest thing. So going back to one of the things about record keeping is record keeping doesn't happen in a vacuum.
You're in the world doing something. You're a nonprofit, and you are organizing a food bank, and you wouldn't keep old food.
You want to write. You do need to be rid of that because you're not trying to poison people.
So it's kind of the same thing when it comes to old information.
This information, the longer you have it, when it's beyond both its active life and its inactive retention period, it only causes harm.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: How about hallucinations? Just. Just kind of jumping. Jumping topics, Right. A little bit. AI it can cause hallucinations because you have so much garbage out there and not a contained environment that's maintained by retention for the AI to use it.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: I. We. You are jumping ahead a couple of. Couple of topics, but that's okay because it's on everyone's mind and it's. And it's the, like the extreme outgrowth of the big data concept that was around a few years ago, which was the needle in the haystack, the hidden gem. You. You abandoned this research 25 years ago, but you saved all the data and you loaded it into a system and now you have the tools to find, you know, the new, the new breakthrough that's going to make you billions of dollars.
The combination of that mindset of Big Data plus AI Tools, it's searching for that, that hidden gem. But in fact, in more cases, that combination of neglected data, the Keep Everything forever mode that was behind Big Data plus AI tools is going to get you hallucinations, it's going to get you something that looks internally logically consistent, but in fact you had proven it false before because it's based on wrong versions, old versions, or dead end research that you abandoned for a good reason. Mix of versions, even a mix of versions. And, and the other problem with the Keep Everything Forever is it's harder to control it. So the context gets confused. The contracts might be missing, might be a bunch of, might be a bunch of copies of things that were put into a file server as part of a migration. And they were basically named by the date that the migration was happening.
You just have a string of numbers. There's a date hidden in there somewhere and a sequence of how they did the server backup and how it got here. But that doesn't mean anything when an AI just comes and looks at it and says, oh, here's a new set of things to look at. And now I found this same thing three times because it was in one of these migration cabinets, it was in the place where it was meant to be stored and it was in somebody's copy. Or more likely than 3,35 times it was across multiple servers, multiple locations.
The more frequently that the same thing shows up, it's going to get a higher relevance score just from, because it seems like, oh, everybody's saying it, it's all over our data, it must be true, but it's not it. Actually, all of those extra places that it was stored, if you don't have the context of how they got there, you, you, the AI might treat them as equally valuable, but they aren't.
And so that could definitely lead you to a wrong conclusion because you have a volume of things that seem to be pointing one way without the light to understand them.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: So what's your what's your wrap up on Keep Everything Forever philosophy?
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Regret it. Regret it forever. Keep everything forever. Regret it forever.
[00:08:53] Speaker A: Okay, fair enough.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: It's a quick fix and it's not worth it.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: All right, good. If you have any questions, please send us an email at info trailblazer.us.com or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com check out the Learning Academy. Check out our apps on the Microsoft, Apple Google Stores, trailblazer Insight and trailblazer Tracker are also out there for you to enjoy to use in business. There are productivity tools.
Thank you for listening. Please tune into our next episode if you like this one. Please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you the listeners. Special thanks goes to. Jason Blake created our music.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: All right.
Thanks everyone.
