Information lifecycle management?

Sounds relatively straight forward, doesn't it ? But if I Google this three letter acronym (TLA) today the top hits are rightly, Industrial Light & Magic. Down the search result list is a wikipedia entry for ILM, then an article from Computerworld on ILM vendors. But where are the vendor entries?

A year or so ago I was awash in ILM white papers, articles and other items from the vendor marketing sausage machines that were telling me why I needed to buy all this fancy hardware to manage my information. We are now told that this is storage 2.0, But where is all this ILM marketing now ? It looks like it has gone the way of most hype cycles, disappeared like a good fireworks display.

Sure storage is important, but it is not the beginning or the end of the the lifecycle of information. We would all agree that storage is not going away but it is increasing because information is increasing and in most cases is still not managed. Organisations are still struggling with the basics of getting the people and process parts of the lifecycle sorted, but unfortunately it is still easier for many to just throw some technology at the problem.