Is the rise in unstructured data swamping your business?

[Cheeky Jim]

I'm working on a new proposition around Unstructured Data Discovery and Clean up and wondered if any of you corporate IT and Infrastructure people might have an opinion? It's more for background research than trying to advertise any product.

Hope this doesn't break any PH rules.

Thanks,

Jamie

[onlynik]

Most of the issues I see are multiple copies of data and assests not willing to spend time clearing up data.

[Cheeky Jim]

Well exactly, but also general rise in information, reports, white papers, imaging, music/sound files, video etc etc all cluttering up a corporate filestore.

Agree, needs to be owned and cleaned. Am just trying to see if it really is as big a problem as people make it out to be.

[DrTre]

Cheeky Jim said:

Well exactly, but also general rise in information, reports, white papers, imaging, music/sound files, video etc etc all cluttering up a corporate filestore.

Agree, needs to be owned and cleaned. Am just trying to see if it really is as big a problem as people make it out to be.

(This is from a non-professional person who may well seek to take a step in this direction in the near future) I reckon it is, hence the like of knowledge managers and information managers...Many organisations have become so entrenched in the silo philosophy, with cost centres attached to each department, that they hoard information and data. This is replicated, becomes out of date, and is just generally a nightmare to manage, to the point where different arms of a business don't share their results with other areas because they don't know it's needed.

[IainT]

DrTre said:

(This is from a non-professional person who may well seek to take a step in this direction in the near future) I reckon it is, hence the like of knowledge managers and information managers...Many organisations have become so entrenched in the silo philosophy, with cost centres attached to each department, that they hoard information and data. This is replicated, becomes out of date, and is just generally a nightmare to manage, to the point where different arms of a business don't share their results with other areas because they don't know it's needed.

This is spot on.

I work primarily with spatial data and my organisation has a poor internal history with this respect. Partly because it's a number of previously separate companies made into a whole and partly because of varying requirements for the data.

e.g. One team needs data to be positionally accurate, another only needs vague accuracy. A third team needs a different set of attribution and the fourth needs to link the data to something else.

My team has currently brought spatial data together from >20 different sources and systems into a common storage and delivery platform and the challenges, not just technical, are huge.

That's before we even look at other types of data!

[Cheeky Jim]

IainT said:

My team has currently brought spatial data together from >20 different sources and systems into a common storage and delivery platform and the challenges, not just technical, are huge.

That's before we even look at other types of data!

This I can well believe is a very difficult task.

I guess the other point of this, is not just cleaning datastores out, but restructuring them so that the information you do need is grouped together in a more logical way and that is more accessible to users.

[Cheeky Jim]

Thans for responding. This is another blatant attempt to see if anyone else would lie to add their 2 pennies!

[fieldl]

http://www.varonis.com/products/datadvantage/