When formulating a discovery preparedness strategy, organizations must consider and accept the fact that electronically stored information (ESI) is growing at an explosive rate. Knowledge workers are generating content at a faster rate than we've ever known and have an increasingly addictive reliance on email– the most used and most risk-laden communication tool today. This overload causes discovery to become even more burdensome. I don't know of a single analyst report indicating the growth of business content will slow. In fact, not only is the volume increasing, but the rate of growth is increasing as well.

Not so long ago, content growth was seen as strictly an IT storage issue. The "keep everything" mentality was prevalent. Storage costs were decreasing, so adding storage devices seemed somewhat acceptable. From a discovery standpoint, these unmanaged storage silos soon became risks to the organization and their content dangerous in a court of law.

Today's combination of ever-growing volumes of decentralized information and the necessity to adhere to complex regulations (and potential litigation) pose a unique dilemma. More and more disparate haystacks of information are being created with little governance. Whether they are being created by imaging systems, document management systems or email archiving systems, they can pose serious risk to the organization if left ungoverned.

Some companies have taken an aggressive approach, particularly with email, and delete all content after a certain period of time. This solution creates false hopes because the retention period isn't tied to the business value of the information, which is traditionally done with other forms of content. This impacts business process and causes serious pain when you really need the information. And in the end, may not meet judicial expectations of managing information on a consistent basis–no matter what the format.

These scenarios are motivating today's businesses to develop plans to maintain and carefully manage the retention and disposition of their corporate information to help mitigate risk. The volume of content is increasing and the real question should be: what's its useful life and how long should we keep it?