A growing number of offerings lately seem to be targeting information inventory automation – and I’m definitely a fan, because inventorying information can be such an onerous task. (See here, here, and here for more.) But as in any competitive arena, the devil is in the details, and so far, I haven’t seen any that are as comprehensive, lightweight, and deterministic as the one we use to expedite this process for our clients.
Here are a few test questions to ask as you consider your options:
Does it require you to buy or implement something else first?
Most of what I’m seeing either require the existence of a records system to bolt on to, or are new systems unto themselves, involving lengthy procurement processes to acquire and ongoing technical and user support thereafter. Ours is a lightweight utility that operates at the data layer and requires no human intervention other than to tell it when to turn on and when to turn off.
Does it cover your entire information landscape?
Many offerings cover only Microsoft stacks or a limited palette of media types and file formats. This may be OK if your objective is to inventory one particular environment, but it’s a completely different story if you’re trying to understand your organization’s overall information landscape. That’s why ours can be pointed at (permissions permitting) virtually everything you want to inventory – regardless of where it resides or what format it happens to be in.
Is it identifying what’s actually there, or is it guessing with AI?
More than a few of the available technologies tout their use of AI to identify what’s in their repositories. The problem here is that AI is probabilistic, meaning the best it can do is tell you which types are most likely to be present. However, the whole point of the exercise is to actually know what’s present. So our approach is deterministic, meaning it identifies what is actually there rather than asking an algorithm to calculate the odds of something falling into this or that classification.
I’ve no doubt that any technology you choose will alleviate your information inventory pain, especially considering how difficult and time-consuming it is to do it the old-fashioned way (i.e., by asking people about their data use and habits). But your objective isn’t to make it easier and faster, it’s to produce intelligence about your information that you can really trust and confidently use to make decisions.
So if you’re evaluating one of these technologies, look carefully at the systems requirements, comprehensiveness, and decision method of each – as well as cost, of course, which is often (but needn’t be) tied to the answers you receive.