Everyone has a junk drawer.
Old batteries. Mystery keys. Charging cables that fit devices nobody owns anymore. You do not know why half of it is there, but nobody wants to throw anything away.
Businesses can treat information the same way.
Files pile up. Email accumulates. Records move between systems. People save another copy because deleting anything feels risky.
Eventually, the business has plenty of information but not enough answers.
What do we have? Where is it? Who owns it? Who can access it? And why are we keeping it?
When does business data become a junk drawer?
Business data becomes difficult to govern when the organization loses visibility into what information it has, where that information resides, who owns it and why the business retains it. Information governance brings structure to those decisions.
The comparison to a junk drawer sounds funny until someone actually needs something.
Then everybody starts digging.
The same problem appears when a business needs an old contract, an important email, a customer record or information connected to a legal request. Finding the right information becomes much easier when the organization already knows what it has and where that information belongs.
Strong information governance starts with common sense questions about where organizational data lives, who owns it, how the organization protects it and what happens at the end of the data lifecycle.
Why not just keep everything?
Keeping everything can create more data to manage, search, protect and review. Information governance calls for organizations to understand the information lifecycle and establish retention policies that reflect business and regulatory requirements.
Your actual junk drawer has limits. Eventually it refuses to close.
Business information does not give you that warning. 
Email, files and other unstructured information can spread across Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Exchange and other locations. Good records management starts by identifying information and controlling access to it.
The objective is not to delete information simply because the information is old. The organization needs to know what it has, understand applicable requirements and make deliberate decisions about retention, archiving and disposal.
That brings us to the most useful question of all: what deserves to stay?
How do you clean up the data junk drawer?
Start by discovering and categorizing information before deciding what to keep, archive or remove. Identify ownership and access at the same time so valuable or sensitive information does not disappear into another pile.
Begin with a few practical questions:
- What information does the organization have?
- Where does the information live?
- Who owns the information?
- Who can access it?
- Which policies apply?
- Which information is redundant, obsolete or trivial?
- What information must remain available for business, legal or regulatory reasons?
Now the junk drawer starts to look more like an organized toolbox.
The business knows what belongs. People know where to find it. Someone owns the decision about what stays.
That organization becomes especially important when a legal matter requires the company to find relevant electronic information.
What happens when someone suddenly needs the data?
eDiscovery depends on the ability to identify and collect relevant electronic information. Data spread across email, file shares, messages and other systems can make that task harder to manage.
That is one reason information governance cannot begin after somebody asks for a record.
A better approach gives the organization visibility into information before the pressure arrives. A sound eDiscovery process helps an organization address electronically stored information relevant to a legal matter.
You do not want to dump the junk drawer onto the floor every time someone asks where a document went.
Know what you have. Know where it belongs. Know why you are keeping it.
Then make the decisions before somebody else needs the answer.
If your organization’s information has started to look like a junk drawer nobody wants to open, contact us to start the conversation.
