A few years ago, I worked with a client that had an underground refrigerated vault containing thousands of reels of this film. As a Certified Records Manager, I’m often called in to assist companies with their information challenges, but this was new for me — it’s not often that my job can be described as hazardous. Thankfully, we took the necessary precautions and there were no incidents. But it got me thinking about the lack of foresight of those who originally stored this film.

Here were some of the most classic movies and cartoons of all time, stored in a format that could literally go up in flames in any moment, with little to no infrastructure to support their long-term storage. And there were relatively few records being stored — especially when compared to today’s information challenges.

According to IDC, humanity will generate 40 zettabytes of information by the year 2020.¹ That’s 40 trillion gigabytes. Most of this is unstructured data, meaning that building an efficient information infrastructure is of vital importance for businesses that want to capture and leverage useful business information. Records management is a critical part of that entire process, as establishing and maintaining an information repository for past and future data allows workers to use that information to make better business decisions.

When I came to Ricoh, I came to an organization that understands the importance of the front end of the document lifecycle. In my experience, records management should always be part of your integrated information governance strategy, rather than an afterthought at the end of this lifecycle. This is because information governance is about more than just retention — it’s about making information easily accessible and structured in a way that matches its value. And it means securing that information so your critical business data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, so you limit your risk and maintain compliance with all applicable regulations.