Peer to Peer Magazine

54 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | FALL 2017 Information governance oen feels like an exercise in futility. Our information governance (IG) strategies are failing, and they are doing so for the same reasons that entire societies fail. In "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," Jared Diamond argues that the collapse of societies follows "somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme." IG strategies, aempts to maximize the value of information while minimizing the costs or risks of controlling this information, collapse in ways that parallel the societal collapses described by Diamond, and by following these parallels to their source and learning how to change what we are doing wrong, we can find new ways to engage IG for success. Damage In societies, people inadvertently inflict damage on their environment. The extent of this damage depends on how susceptible the environment is to the damage and how resilient it is in overcoming the damage. With IG, people inadvertently inflict damage on their data because they have not assessed how susceptible they are to data loss. Most have never assessed their resilience to overcoming such a loss because IG is seen as less important than other phases of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) framework. Expansion Our societies keep expanding year aer year with new forms of food and transportation and communication, but we have no previous experience with how to deal with all this growth. We expect technology and social media to help us manage it, but we continue to use old assumptions and biases. We must change these assumptions to generate real value from such explosive growth in assets. We are also facing an information overload brought on by all of this growth. According to "The Global Information Technology Report 2016," we are now living in the "zeabyte era" (one zeabyte equals one trillion gigabytes). By the year 2020, global IP traffic could reach 2.3 zeabytes with over 26 billion internet- connected devices and four billion global internet users. We talk about "zeabytes" even though we have no real context for what they are or what to do with them. How much work can be accomplished in one day with one zeabyte of data, and what tools will be used to do this? The answer is not to build more on this information base but to make sense of what we already have. Just when we think we are ready for this year's by Evan Benjamin The Rise and Fall (and Resurgence?) of Information Governance LESSONS LEARNED The Rise and Fall (and Resurgence?) of Information Governance During the War of 1812, American Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry had a battle flag made that said "Don't Give Up the Ship." That flag helped motivate his crew to win a decisive victory. In the battle against big data, our flag would read "Don't Give Up the Data," but would we be victorious? LESSONS LEARNED

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