One of the popular geek pissing contests is comparing how far back your email archives go. It’s a game I’ve enjoyed playing in the past and quite regularly one given that I’d never deleted an email (ahh the days before spam…). Still, as Andy has just discovered, it’s not always as useful as it first seems:

 I have to say though I’m not sure keeping all of this email was the best idea. I’ve glanced at a few old emails while sorting this evening and… well put it this way, would you want a detailed account of your uni years? If your email is just building up without requiring any effort on your part then there’s no real advantage to deleting it and it may as well sit there. Once you come to expend time and effort migrating that email though it just becomes a waste of your time. The trouble is, now that you’ve got all that email, you’ve got no idea which bits are important to keep and which aren’t. You’re stuck on the treadmill of migrations until it eventually gets so time consuming that you figure it’s easier to just dump everything and start again.

On the other hand, if you only keep emails that are worth keeping from the outset, you have a much simpler migration path when you change systems and if you do want to cull anything that was once useful but now isn’t, it’s a much smaller set of emails to sort through. I switched to this system a few years back and am very happy with it. I still have too much stuff in my “Other” folder which tends to hold all the web receipts and things like that which are critical to keep until a certain point and then become useless. It’s not really worth setting up a system to make them easier to manage though so I’m just leaving the folder to grow – it’s still a far more manageable mess than if I saved every email.

Of course, this isn’t just limited to email – anywhere you store content is susceptible to this kind of problem. As you get more and more content in the system, migrating to a better system becomes harder and harder, but more importantly, it gets harder and harder to find the actual information you want. Even with fantastic search and incredibly detailed categorization, there’s only so far any information architecture will get you and keeping that information architecture running requires more and more effort as you get more and more documents.

So deleting outdated content and any other content that’s no longer useful from your system is incredibly important.  Just as programmers should remove unused code from their programs, content management users and administrators should remove unused content from their repositories. Remember, it’s about quality, not quantity – a small set of really useful content is far better than a massive repository of everything the company ever created but that nothing can be found in.

Remember, the challenge of information technology isn’t in storing stuff, it’s in storing only the good stuff.

Update: See, what did I tell you – Rich Bowen: What we’ve been saying for *years*

What seems to be missing from this story is the time component. That is, if they don’t do it now, they will have to do it later, and the longer they wait, the more it will cost. Every new record adds costs to the total, and that cost will be paid by the entire health-care-consuming public.