Children are amazing; they look at life with such a simplistic perspective. Around two and a half years ago, my family was in our [almost] new Quest van traveling down the Capital of Texas Highway in Austin. I looked back at the kids and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the door panel on my youngest son’s side was a dull gray color, instead of black. I asked what was wrong with the door to make it look that way and he replied that he didn’t know.

As we moved down the road I kept wondering how the van could already be messed up. Did something spill and they were afraid of telling me? Is it delaminating? Then I heard it … sniffling. After slowly putting the pieces together I realized that my wonderful bundle of joy had allergies and no tissues. He knows he is not supposed to wipe his snot on his clothes so guess where it went? Bingo; the door panel. Holy cow! He must have been wiping snot on the door for months because the whole thing was a different color. There is little to take away from this but I am gonna try, so here it goes: imagine your business is the van and your information is all the boogers and snot.

People usually strive to take care of their possessions and do what they can to preserve or increase their value. A major contributing factor to the value of a company is its intellectual property, which often takes the form of or is described in the information you store on your computer or network. Like a booger, you know you need to do “something” with it, but what?

Most micro and small companies I run in to have a huge folder on someone’s computer that is shared to everyone in the office. While that may work, it is not the best solution. I cannot remember a time where I have seen this approach and the company had regular backups in place; that is a big risk. Combine that with the absence of RAID and you just made things worse.

Company IP should be stored where it can be searched, accessed, described via metadata, and protected. Think of using a document management system and start employing backups if you don’t already do so. There are plenty of free or low cost solutions out there so there are no excuses.

Having my son clean up his mess only cost him some time … cleaning up a company’s data mess (loss) could mean going out of business or seriously impacting your operation.

Let me know your thoughts!