Improved storage technology means you can keep almost all the information you generate and receive nowadays. That’s great, but it can also make finding the particular file you need, when you need it, a whole lot harder – especially if you have been a bit haphazard with how you name files and organise folders. Welcome to the new world of data retention and management.
It’s not news that storage is cheap and getting cheaper—in 1957, one megabyte cost over $US400m to store. In 2010, it cost less than two cents. Today, it costs less than half a cent.
Back in 2012, research firm IDC and IT solution provider EMC (now DellEMC) said there’d be 40 zettabytes of data in the world by 2020.This year, software company Veritas estimated that unstructured or ‘dark’ data (information that isn’t laid out in searchable tables like databases) can account for 90 per cent of the information in an organisation.
That means finding mission critical data can unnecessarily cost your business time and money. Improperly labelled or misnamed files can make this problem even worse — to say nothing of the dangers of version control issues or even duplicating work that’s already been done.
Have a methodology
You must accept that digital file management is a vital business function, no different from marketing or product development. It doesn’t represent billable time, but an ounce of prevention now will save you a tonne of trouble later.
First, design a filename and metadata strategy now. A naming convention will make finding old information easier, and new tools make searching and organising using tags and metadata very easy. The time saved across the whole transaction can translate directly to your bottom line.
Because we live in a connected world, there’s more likelihood suppliers, colleagues and even customers will have the means to manipulate your data from different locations and systems, and proper data management makes sharing and collaboration easier.
Tools like Office 365 (outlook.office365.com) or Google Docs (docs.google.com) are great for version control. Changes made by different stakeholders are easily traceable, even when several people are working on the same document concurrently.
Business intelligence on the march
One of the most compelling reasons for a file management strategy is because all that information contains insights you’re otherwise missing.
A tool like Truedash (https://www.truedash.com)) lets you apply big data principles to unstructured data—import spreadsheets, cloud based app data and even social media posts into a single platform for a deep overview of business metrics.
In fact, you might be surprised about the extent of information you can keep and action. Sydney-based Resonate Solutions offers a platform that lets you collect and extract meaning from customer feedback from ‘listening channels’ like SMS, surveys and social media chatter.
Images or video add another level of complexity when searching for the data you want. This is where tags and metadata are extremely useful, when the keyword information isn’t contained in the file itself.
Zegami (https://www.zegami.com) is an asset viewing platform that can display tens of thousands of assets and let you view, group and search through them dynamically. If you’re an architecture firm with a million photos in a folder and want to see only the ones with portico doorways, the platform will quickly collect and zoom in on them thanks to the tags and metadata behind them.
Auto processing
If your workflows are all online, some platforms even connect your various web apps and do file management for you. An example is Zapier (https://zapier.com), which allows you to choose from thousands of automated tasks (or ‘Zaps’) between a wide array of commonly used apps and services.
For example, you can configure a Zap to detect a new email in your Gmail account, move the attachment to a predetermined folder in your Box account and then alert you on Slack that you have a new file.
Of course, in this day and age you can recruit artificial intelligence to manage files too. Smartvid (http://www.Smartvid.io) is a platform for field industries like construction where site managers and workers take millions of photos to report on projects, all with different naming conventions and stored everywhere from phones and tablets to email attachments.
Smartvid automatically applies tags and metadata to content using smart image processing and voice recognition (for video content), dynamically grouping it together.
We’re creating and keeping more content than ever before, and the next big business science of the 21st century will be making it searchable. With some robust file management principles behind you, you’ll be ahead of the curve.