The “information calorie” and “information cap-and-trade,” explored next, are two new models designed to help with the challenge of governing information.
Table 7.1 Key Steps in the IG Process
1. Clean 2. Build and Maintain 3. Monetize
Information inventory IG policies and procedures Create value through
information, e.g., drive sales and improve customer satisfaction Defensible deletion Corporate governance,
compliance and audit
Business insights Records retention and legal hold Technology Increase margins Source: Barclay T. Blair
Information Calorie
The Western world is suffering from an embarrassment of riches when it comes to calories. The calorie has been weaponized in the form of tasty, cheap, and fast food loaded with sugar and fat. Even a cup of “coffee” can contain as much as 800 calories.19 We have gotten very, very good at maximizing available calories, at a staggering cost:
$190 billion per year in additional medical spending as a result of obesity in the United States, greater than the cost of smoking. 20
Governments are taking action. A new national health care law in the United States requires restaurant chains to disclose calorie counts for the food they sell by 2013, building on similar state laws.21 Calories are not inherently bad. We would liter- ally die without them. But too many calories make us sick.
The analogy to information is clear. Information is the “lifeblood” of our organi- zations and is central to our survival. But too much unmanaged unstructured informa- tion leaves us fat, slow, and coughing and wheezing at the back of the pack.
In 2012, New York City initially passed a controversial law limiting the size of soft drinks that can be sold at movie theaters and convenience stores (later chal- lenged in court). The “Bloomberg soda ban” was based on the premise that humans need help making good choices. There is some basis for this approach, with studies showing that, for example, the size of the candy scoop determines how much free candy we eat.22 Under the new law, it was still possible in New York to buy two smaller cups of soda, but it was hoped that inconvenience (and cost) will reduce overconsumption.
A new study . . . examined consumer behavior before and after calorie counts were posted, and determined that when restaurants post calories on menu boards, there is a reduction in calories per transaction.
—Bryan Bollinger, Phillip Leslie, Alan Sorensen, “Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants,” Stanford University, January 2010 Thinking about information as calories at your organization can improve aware- ness of its costs and drive change. The goal is not to add friction to desirable behaviors, like collaboration and mobile work, but rather to make it more diffi cult to create and consume empty information calories.
Here are some tips to get started:
■ Educate executives and employees about the cost of information mismanagement s through anecdotes, case studies, and facts.
■ Show employees their information footprint by regularly exposing them to the t amount of data storage they are using in e-mail, shared drives, content man- agement systems, and other environments they work with. With a little creative programming, you can post “information calories” on your menus.
■ Design systems to minimize information calories. Examples include: preventing employees from exporting e-mail to .pst fi les; turning off the ability to store documents on desktop hard drives to encourage the use of managed collabo- ration environment; and requiring employees to send links to shared content rather than creating yet another e-mail attachment. Clever technology and social engineering, like the soda ban, can drive healthy information behavior.
Information Cap-and-Trade
Originally designed as a regulatory approach for fi ghting acid rain in the 1980s, cap-and-trade has gained new attention as a method of curbing carbon emissions.
Cap-and-trade systems differ from command-and-control regulatory approaches that mandate, rather than economically encourage, a course of action. In other words, rather than forcing companies to install scrubbers on power plant exhausts (command and control), cap-and-trade provides companies with an emissions quota, which they can hit as they see fi t, and even profi t from. Companies with unused room on their quota can sell those “credits” on specialized markets.
Consider a cap-and-trade system for information. Do not limit the creation and storage of useful information—that defeats the purpose of investing in IT in the fi rst l place. Rather, design a cap-and-trade system that controls the amount of information pollution and rewards innovation and management discipline.
While there is no objective “right amount” of information for every organization or department, we can certainly do better than “as much as you want, junk or not.”
After all, “nearly all sectors in the US economy had at least an average of 200 terabytes of stored data . . . and many sectors had more than 1 petabyte in mean stored data per company.” 23 Moreover, up to 50 percent of that information is easily identifi able as data pollution. 24 So, we have a reasonable starting point.
Here are some tips for creating an information cap-and-trade system:
■ Baseline the desired amount of information per system, department, and/or type t of user. How much information do you currently have? How much has value?
How much should you have? These are not easy questions to answer, but even rough calculations can make a big difference.
■ Create information volume targets or quotas, and allocate them by business unit, system, or user. This is the “cap” part of the system.
■ Calculate the fully loaded cost of a unit of information , and adopt it as a baseline metric for the “trade” part of the system. Consider whether annual e-discovery costs can be allocated to this unit in a reasonable way.
■ Create an internal accounting system for tracking and trading information units, s or credits within the organization. Innovative departments will be rewarded, laggards will be motivated.
■ Get creative in what the credits can purchase. New revenue-generating software?
Headcount?
“There’s not a person in a business anywhere who gets up in the morning and says, ‘Gee, I want to race into the offi ce to follow some regulation.’ On the other hand, if you say, ‘There’s an upside potential here, you’re going to make money,’ people do get up early and do drive hard around the possibility of fi nding themselves winners on this.”
—Dan Etsy, environmental policy professor at Yale University, quoted in Richard Conniff, “The Political History of Cap and Trade,”
Smithsonian Magazine (August 2009)