Data Classification: Brains or Brawn? Wikibon.org Community Releases Latest Peer Incite™

Marlborough, MA (PRWeb) March 29, 2007 -- Wikibon.org (http://www.wikibon.org), the world's first open source IT research and advisory community, today released results from its latest Peer Incite™ research meeting. The following is a summary statement by community member Dave Vellante. "In short, data classification will serve as the foundation for information value management and without auto-classification there is little chance of success."

Data Classification: Brains or Brawn? "The current state of data classification is largely a byproduct of historical, hierarchical storage management (HSM) implementations where data age is the primary classification criterion. Early visions of classifying data based on business value never fully came to fruition because it required a manual, brute force approach and was too hard to automate. Age-based classification enabled automation processes to be more easily applied to data classification initiatives and became the de facto standard.

"A new emphasis on compliance, discovery, archiving and provenance substantially challenges existing data classification taxonomies. These new business value drivers require 'never delete' retention policies as well as performance, availability and recovery attributes to enable resurgent data classification efforts. While generally age-based schema predominate, they must more aggressively incorporate richer classification attributes. However this extension should be accomplished with an eye toward automation where data set meta-data is auto-classified upon creation and/or use of the data set. Future data classification efforts will involve much broader perspectives and serve as the mainspring of multiple enterprise initiatives, including: ILM, tiered storage, email archiving, decision support, data mining, electronic content management and compliance. In short, data classification will serve as the foundation for information value management and without auto-classification there is no chance of success."

Action Item: "IT organizations must break with the past and make business process, not age of data sets the defining catalyst for classification schema." This approach will not scale without auto-classification capabilities that assign meta-data to data sets at the point of creation or use. Emerging tagging methodologies borrowed from social networking may provide a complementary user-driven approach, but these will not suffice for compliance and legal requirements.

About Wikibon
Wikibon is a worldwide community of practitioners, consultants, and researchers dedicated to improving the adoption of technology and business systems through an open source sharing of free advisory knowledge. Co-founded by former Meta Group and IDC executives Wikibon (http://www.wikibon.org) is a place where professionals can collaborate, share knowledge and do good work.

Media Contact:
Dave Vellante:    (508) 498-8873
David Floyer:    (650) 960-1094

# # #