Are you a Data Hygienist?
The first real job in my formative years was as a line cook at a Big Boy family restaurant in north-central Indiana. I learned many lessons about working with people, teamwork, customer service, inventory management, and managing a business. In the kitchen, I remember the grizzled cook that had been there for many years telling me when there was a break in the dinner rush: “If you've got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean”. That mantra stuck with me for the rest of my career. In a conversation today with my partners, Jason Thompson and Michael Epstein, we were discussing the dusty data landscape of Microsoft Teams and other collaboration sites. Every organization, including Kindato, struggles daily with ensuring their team members accidently don’t use erroneous chats and meeting notes. Naturally, the conversation then led towards how to manage SharePoint and shared folders across a myriad of cloud platforms. My career in technology allows me to play with terabytes (and sometime petabytes) of unstructured data. Now I’m spending quite a bit of time in Microsoft Teams, Slack, Trello, and a few other collaboration technologies across the different projects we are engaged. These tools are amazing at providing the foundation for remote teams to continue working together especially in the middle of a pandemic. The challenge is that collaboration technologies often become a “data dumping ground” for all sorts of data such as meeting notes, files, meeting recordings, and chats. This makes it very difficult to manage on a day-to-day basis as well as raises the risk of retaining large volumes of unknown data. Building data hygiene and data management into the culture of your organization is a healthy way to manage the exploding volume of data that is stored across these [...]
