Once upon a time—back when paper ruled—junk mail was clearly junk.  We easily separated the bills from the ads, and it never crossed our minds to save the ads “just in case.”  Fast forward to today’s digital world, and we find that not only are we doubling the volume of data every two years, we are outpacing our storage and, arguably, our ability to manage it. We’re keeping the “ads” and a whole lot more.

When it comes to information governance, at some point you just have to get started. In a recent blog post for the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), I discuss how these issues may be impacting your organization. Rather than focusing first on the seemingly insurmountable challenge of dealing with the backlog of messaging and unstructured data, consider instead applying the finance-inspired concept of zero-based budgeting. Reverse the traditional approach that addresses only variance from the status quo, which in the case of information governance is woefully outdated. Instead, start from zero.