Design Principles for Information Lifecycle Management
Till recently when I along with some of my peers had the opportunity to provide consulting to an American Bank, I had the perception that Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) was all about Infrastructure technologies, maybe, because I come from a Datacenter background where I spent couple of years designing solutions for clients across industry verticals for Infrastructure Management Services.
As I write my introductory blog I am convinced that ILM is not just about implementing storage solutions – what organizations need is an enterprise roadmap to operationalize ILM.
Friends, in this blog I would like to start with the industry definition of ILM and the critical success factors for designing Information Lifecycle so that we all are on the same page and have the right context before I jump on to my expereince of what Information Lifecycle should be.
As per Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) ILM Technical Work Group), Information Lifecycle Management comprises 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 to its final disposal.
When we started our consulting engagement, I put on my ITSM hat and started thinking about what does ITSM, or for that matter, ITIL have to do with ILM? And then it dawned on me – ITIL v3 introduces the Service Lifecycle approach. So what about ILM as a service? There you go!
Believe it or not we do have a tendency to focus too much on infrastructure and technology aspects while designing solutions for ILM. Agreed that infrastructure is important, but even before we get to the infrastructure, we have to lay down the basic foundation on top of which infrastructure has to play a role and think about how to sustain it in the long term (which we did by developing ILM as a service). ILM is not something that can be achieved by one single team, it is a collaborative effort and every single team in an organization could have a role to play if ILM is to be a success across the enterprise (which we did by engaging relevant groups within the organization).
So dear friends the two critical success factors for the success of ILM at an enterprise level are – Leverage best practices (ITIL v3’s Service concept) and engage relevant groups within the organization.
In the American Bank where we were engaged for ILM we did not think strategy, we thought operations. We thought – how can we enable ILM while performing day to day operations and then link our solution to the existing teams and design the responsibility matrix with them in mind. A joint governance team was created, again keeping the relevant teams in mind. Hence the initiatives that will help in ILM enablement for our client is something that have been developed keeping shared goals of the operations teams in mind. Was our approach right? Or were we wrong?
Ladies and Gentlemen, I leave you with the thoughts above till my next blog where I will delve into more detail of the ILM process, the ILM Service, the ILM framework and much more. Till then Cheers…
