Good Data Hygiene and Why It Matters!

What is Data Hygiene?

Data hygiene is the process of keeping your files, documents, and emails (including attachments) correctly categorized, organized, and secure. Files, Documents, and Emails that are outdated, incomplete, duplicated, or simply incorrect, in terms of the information in the documents, where they are stored, and the metadata tags and security that are assigned to them, is known as “dirty data,” which data hygiene practices seek to address.

Every time a user saves a document or file to "the system" it is important that they ensure that it is saved in the proper location, or if location is not a relevant aspect of your file structure, then an alternative process known as a profile will be attached to your document and saved in a separate database. The Profile will follow the document in a database, and it is where all the relevant metadata and tagging is stored.

Using SharePoint and Microsoft 365 to Store Your Files

If you are using SharePoint or OneDrive (a variant of SharePoint) you data is being tagged with metadata automatically. That Metadata is not stored in a separate database, but "within" the document or file specifically. Third party solutions often use profile screens to match a profile to a document, but Microsoft does not. In SharePoint (or OneDrive) when you save a document or file to a SharePoint Site (or on to your OneDrive) the document automatically adds metadata that can be used to find the file in the future, using search, or filters.

What is Metadata and Tags?

Every Microsoft Word document, the moment it is saved somewhere, adds the Author (or Created By), Creation Date, Last Modified Date to the document. These properties, are "metadata". If you want to add specific tags to a document, users can simply type a tag out and add it to the document using the tags feature in Microsoft Word. The tags and the automatic metadata can be used to search for the document or filter out search results.

Configured and Designed SharePoint Architecture

If you are saving your files to a SharePoint site, like an attached network drive, it is unlikely that your IT Team took the time to setup SharePoint Search to take advantage of tagging and metadata, although SharePoint will try anyway.

Additionally, SharePoint is Microsoft's Content Management/Storage platform. What this means is that SharePoint can be setup to store billions of documents and files, so long as the architecture of the sites, and the metadata tagging is configured to work correctly when so much content is intended to be stored and searched in your Microsoft 365 Tenant.

If your IT Department has taken the time to setup SharePoint document ids, and metadata properties (tags) that are automatically added to the document files when they are saved into SharePoint, along with security settings that are inherited to the files when they are saved, then you are already several steps ahead in terms of good data hygiene. Automatic security settings to saved files, along with metadata tagging that includes "Project, Department, Matter, Client, Customer, Document Type, and more" is the type of hygiene on your documents that you want. Why is it so important now?

Compliance and Artificial Intelligence pairs well with Data Hygiene

Now that AI is upon us, the automation of workflows and tasks will become ubiquitous. Unfortunately, improperly tagged documents, or worse - incorrectly secured data - will now become the next "must have" before automation should be attempted. This is because users will ask AI to do tasks or begin automation processes which include or exclude specific content (documents and files). If these documents or files are duplicated, improperly secured, have the wrong tags on them, or have outdated information, the AI will not know this. It will either exclude the data, include the data, or surface up incorrect information, all because the datasets that it was told to use was poorly maintained, and is unhygienic. This may create the ultimate annoyance, which is that a supervisor of the automated process will need to be created as a new role for humans. In other words, the human worker who was effective at the task set, would be replaced on the given task set by a less efficient automation process BECAUSE the data it is using is either incorrectly tagged or its content is inaccurate.

The Simple Reason for Hygienic Data

If your data is not stored in the correct locations when automatic metadata is utilized, or if manual metadata application is done incorrectly, not only will your AI Automation work inconsistently, your security regarding the use of AI will also be at risk. Which of course, for many, is a compliance issue.

Moonlight 365 Technologies, Inc., can review and assess your SharePoint environment, no matter who built it, or why you use it. During the assessment we can determine if you have security issues, or poorly applied hygiene when it pertains to your documents and files. Once informed, you will have several low cost ways to help clean up that data.