By: Rene Sloos, VP Solutions, Bulletproof InfoTech
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
It really amazes me how many companies I work with do have no real system in place to organize one of their biggest assets, their data files. Incredible amounts of valuable time and productivity are lost because employees do not know where to store and find certain types of information.
Is does not matter if you work for a small or large company, if employees do not clean up their `data mess`behind them, because they have no time, it will set your company up for failure. You need to know what the relevance is of information to your company. You also need to know when information needs to be archived or discarded. Some companies will just throw more data storage capacity at the problem, but it pushes the problem to the future. IT departments and external IT Service providers (like Bulletproof InfoTech) have to spend a lot of extra time managing and perhaps migrating senseless data. At the end of the day the client pays for this management of chaos.
Adding storage capacity will only temporarily fix the actual problem: the proper management of information. I always tell my customers `The bigger the basement the more junk!`. I was reminded today about the incredible amount of storage space we can offer to our clients by a demo carried out by Adam Crapper and Carole Powell of Dell of an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN Device which seems incredibly easy to deploy and administer. The top of the line model can handle up to 48 TB (that is Terra Bytes!!!) of storage capacity! Although these type of units are priced very competitive, they are still not cheap.
There are certainly cases where a huge amount of storage is required, but it would be good for a lot of businesses to actually conduct a spring cleaning and spend some time in getting everything organized, before it grows into a bigger mess. We call that `Sharpening the saw`. Did you ever spend an hour looking for a document – knowing it was there – but you didn’t know ‘where’? Most people are running into that problem over and over again. The solution is… ORGANIZE your files properly.
Think of your computer as an electronic FILING CABINET. A filing cabinet is not complex and is the reason why we usually CAN find our stuff in it. Apply this non-complexity to your computer when setting up your archive. Use the ‘KISS’ system. (Keep It Simple Stupid!) Whether you are storing your files on your own system or on a network, one of the tricks is to use as FEW folders as possible. Here are the 4 steps:
- Save all files into ONE DIRECTORY. Windows created “My Documents” for that purpose — but if you are sharing files with others, use your shared network drive.
- Create sub directories for projects, clients, or CATEGORIES of work. You can nest project folders in client folders or the other way around, but be careful – keep it simple. Discuss with your co-workers a logical structure of the information so everyone knows where to STORE and FIND all files. The FEWER directories, the fewer places to look!
- Do NOT SHORTHAND the name of your documents. Today, you have 255 characters to name a file. This has a huge advantage: KEYWORDS. To name your document, use as many keywords to describe the content of the file.
- How it works: I’m out of town and my assistant needs to find this article. This is what she does: Go to the Start Menu, Search, My Documents and type in any of the words I used to DESCRIBE the document’s content and – ‘Voila!’ – it’s there in seconds!
If you need help creating a centralized secured file storage area (using a Microsoft Small Business Server or a Network Attached Storage unit) give Bulletproof InfoTech a call at 403-206-2233.
Happy organizing, it will pay off!
