The structured data records blindspot is biting us all through privacy legislation.

One area which has been liberally ignored by most of the Records profession, is structured data.

Largely, that’s been OK. 

We’ve been exchanging data in static representations of what appeared in a structured data system – and keeping records of that.

It does mean that we’ve endlessly migrated structured data from system to system, without ever destroying it.

And that’s the problem now.

It’s left us all incredibly light on capability in structured data, and now privacy law is exposing it.

I think there are four basic capabilities for most privacy legislation:

1. Comprehensive and searchable identification of all records associated with a client – structured and unstructured.
2. The ability to package all client records for export.
3. The ability to sentence data.
4. The ability to defensibly destroy.

While the first and second capabilities can be taken care of with good enterprise search, the last two have been mostly ignored for many years outside of the records profession, and by records in structured data systems.

And now we have to do them at scale, under time pressure.