Before handwriting gave way to keyboarding, there was one insult you could hurl at an office worker to denigrate their role in the organization: Call them a pencil-pusher.
Pencil-pushers were those stuffy bureaucrats who did nothing more than “”move paper around”” and complicate what should have
been straightforward processes. There are still pencil-pushers today, but they’re not using pencils. And instead of looking merely at the paper, we recognize that there’s data printed on it, and within our IT systems. This is important stuff, which is why a new term to describe those responsible for it — information lifecycle managers — doesn’t carry quite the same sting.
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) recently came out with a definition of information lifecycle management, or ILM. You can tell they’ve been working on this for a while, because it’s so broad that you’d think Canadians came up with it. ILM is “”comprised of the policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived through its final disposition.””
Until now, I’d always thought of ILM as an EMC tagline, not unlike the way IBM uses ‘on-demand’ to sum up its vision for evolving corporate IT environments. SNIA, however, says its ILM definition will provide a blueprint to all sorts of vendors who want to make flexible products. It is also intended to offer CIOs and IT managers a framework with which they can organize their capital budgets and human resources. This is the kind of thing that may be particularly welcomed in the public sector, where definitions provide a galvanizing ethos around major initiatives.
Like Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs), ILM may not be specific enough to separate the truly innovative products and strategies from the run-of-the-mill. With aging infrastructure and a patchwork quilt of vaguely compatible software programs, you could probably still point to the SNIA definition and claim to have embraced ILM. Maybe that’s why EMC has spent this year recruiting IDC analysts to discuss the topic in a roadshow across North America.
Although SNIA says its definition was developed to look beyond data storage, storage is really what this approach is all about. The bulk of it, which talks about aligning IT with the business, could refer to anything from ERP and CRM projects to business intelligence. It’s the last few words (“”IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived through its final disposition””) that ensure storage is part of the picture.
Many people enjoy dreaming up ways to speed the flow of information through the enterprise or technologies that will create more information about existing data. The hard part comes when there’s so much data, and information about data, that the system gets clogged. That’s why ILM is critical. Even with the word “”life”” in its name, ILM is really about how data dies, either by getting stored in a cemetery of tape drives or outright destroyed. Nobody likes to think about death, but those of us busy pushing paper around need to remember that it all has to have a final resting place before we set our pencils to it.
