Finding Data in the Expanding Digital Haystack

With digital storage, organizations can now retain vast information. Company emails, documents, contracts, vendor information and more are now digitally stored. This presents a problem of over-collection and retention of data. As organizations try to cast a wide digital storage net, over-collection and lacking an efficient means to sift through the data makes it harder for organization to find what they need in bloated email servers and databases.

Compliance Governance & Oversight Council (CGOC) research suggests that only 25% of information stored by corporations has a meaningful value to the organization. A small percentage of data needs to be stored for legal purposes, but their research showed an astounding 69% of all data organizations store typically has no significant business, legal or regulatory value at all. While groups like CGOC focus on organizations which are collecting or analyzing huge quantities of data, the same principles apply. Whether you are using algorithms to process billions of files or are a single employee searching through old emails to find an important document, sifting through fewer documents makes the work more efficient.

Many organizations IT Departments resort to simply deleting old information stored on servers, which is also inefficient. You don't make it much easier to find a needle in a haystack by occasionally throwing away a random part of the haystack. As the means of collecting larger quantities of data become easier and available for organizations of any size, there is a massive priority placed on efficiency of knowing what information to retain, and which can be discarded.

For vendor relationships, the most important documents to retain are the vendor's contract, and copies of vendor insurance documents and licenses. Whether you work with 100 vendors or 100,000, in the event of a loss arising from the vendor's work, or a claim on a project the vendor or contractor is working on, you will want to immediately review the vendor contract as well as their insurance documents to determine if your organization faces liability. Many organizations adopt a file-and-forget approach with these documents, which creates clutter. A well developed insurance certificate tracking and screening program should not only reduce the clutter of vendor documents, but make it easier to find and retain them.

bcs, Inc., has a unique method for streamlining your vendor insurance certificate documents that reduces costs and saves enormous amounts of time accessing vendor documents.