Another Year on in the ILM Journey

We are all susceptible to the whims of the media, whether this is in our everyday lives as citizens or in our jobs working for and/or running businesses. All too often issues become over inflated in importance due to the media reaching frenzy point and this can lead to unnecessary panic. At such times it can be hard to distinguish fact from fiction and recognise the true scale of a particular problem.

A good example occurred in March 2006 when a dead swan washed up on a Scottish beach was discovered to be infected with a strain of bird-flu that had caused a number of deaths of people in the Far East. The British media went into overdrive and there was widespread worry about the possibility of a major human flu outbreak. The chances of catching bird-flu directly were very remote, the deaths in Asia being the result of the intimate living conditions shared by humans and poultry. There was, and still is, a real threat that the bird-flu might mutate into a human-flu virus, but once that has occurred, it is contact with other humans that becomes the threat. Even so the most cautious of Britons stopped eating chicken and putting out bread for the birds.

One year on the threat remains the same, birds still catch flu and some humans will catch it from birds. At some point in the future the bird-flu virus will mutate and cause a new outbreak of human-flu as it has done in the past. Once the mutated virus has been isolated it will be possible to produce a vaccine and governments then have the possibility to inoculate their citizens. But, for now, it doesn't seem to matter, the British are eating chicken again and have resumed feeding the birds ? why? ? because the press got bored of the story and stopped writing about it1.

When Quocirca carried out the first of its information lifecycle management (ILM) surveys in autumn 2005 both the business and IT press had been rife for many months with stories about new business regulations and how failure to comply with them could cause a business to collapse and its leaders to end up in jail. These threats have turned out to be all too real for some, witness the 24 year jail sentence dished out to Jeffrey Skilling (former CEO of Enron) in Oct 2006, and the 12 years handed to Sanjay Kumar (former CEO of CA) in November 2006.

But most business managers are not involved in corruption but focussed on trying to achieve good management which includes avoiding regulatory pitfalls. A large part of that entails ensuring good management of their company's information assets and controlling how they are used, a task largely passed down to the IT department and its managers.

When Quocirca looked at the results of the second iteration of the ILM survey run in autumn 2006 it was clear a lot had changed in the proceeding 12 months. Unlike the general public, who in reality could do little about the threat from bird-flu - apart from not cuddling dead swans - IT managers had the option to do something, because the vaccines were already available. They had the option to respond to the changing regulatory environment by putting in place better processes and practices for managing data.

This report looks at the degree to which British and Irish businesses have adapted to regulatory change and to what extent the observed changes of attitude can be attributed to genuine improvement in practice and to what extent this is due to complacency creeping in as the press has moved on to report on other things. In short are businesses more or less prepared for the day the regulators swan in?

In both the 2005 and 2006 surveys Quocirca spoke to 250 IT managers in the UK and Ireland (see appendix 1 for a breakdown of the sample). We are grateful to them for their time, without which reports like this, which look at the state of British and Irish business and monitors how the way they are being managed is changing, would not be possible. This report is aimed at providing business leaders with a peer review and a guide for those vendors in the IT industry who are seeking to help them chart those choppy regulatory waters.