The Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) chapter in Chattanooga was once one of the fastest growing chapters in the US, but since the COVID-19 pandemic hit and stalled in-person gatherings, membership has dwindled to half of what it had been pre-pandemic. Now, in 2023, Infotel Corp. is stepping up to partner with the Chattanooga ARMA chapter to help grow the organization by sponsoring quarterly meetings throughout 2023.
Infotel hopes to bring education to the forefront with these local chapter meetings and understands the importance of knowledge sharing between information management (IM) professionals, who are the industry leaders in policy management for safeguarding important and sensitive data in their respective organizations.
As a global software vendor in the information management space for decades, the Infotel team is rich with professional knowledge and expertise in the industry and is dedicated to providing solutions for IM professionals to help make their data easier to manage, more secure, and in compliance with the latest government regulations and industry standards.
At the March Chattanooga chapter meeting, Morgan Attias, Infotel’s France-based product innovation manager, presented a use case based on two client deployments of Infotel’s latest digital archiving solution, Arvitam. In sharing the real-use experience of Arvitam, Attias aimed to help records managers and archivists learn tools and workflows that others are using to solve similar problems. With use cases, practitioners can learn from experts and colleagues who are doing similar work, discuss what’s working and what’s not, and what to watch out for with potential issues.
We believe it’s essential to share these kinds of use cases, and for colleagues across a multitude of industries and companies to get together and discuss how each other is doing the work. This is why local chapter meetings are so important and why national meetings are equally so.
In his presentation titled “From Big Data to Smart Data: The Concept of Data Minimalism,” Attias discussed how data minimalism can help save organizations money and protect their customers’ data.
By only saving the data you need, when it comes time to archive, organizations save space and minimize the need for finding multiple copies of the same file. Attias recommended organizations not hold onto all personally identifiable information (PII) to reduce the risk of a breach and also said anonymization helps further reduce this risk, by obfuscating PII.
Another practice that Infotel implements and Attias recommends is to force users to only keep one copy of a file. For instance, Infotel limits email data to 200 MB. Though it’s not a lot of data, this practice forces users to delete the data they will never use and also delete redundant data resulting in smaller archives. Attias gave several examples of this practice during the presentation.
We were excited to experience the renewed energy in the greater Chattanooga area for reestablishing the local ARMA chapter. March’s meeting was well-attended with 14 members attending in person and six who joined via livestream. Members asked a lot of great how-to questions both during and after the presentation, giving Attias much to discuss in use case following his presentation.
As a longtime leader in the European market, Infotel is eager to establish itself as a thought leader in North America. And with the help of our marketing partner Perri Marketing Inc, we’re excited to start laying the foundation in Chattanooga. By partnering with ARMA and sharing real-use experiences, Infotel is excited to help grow our organization, while also providing valuable education and insight to practitioners in the field.
For more information about the Chattanooga area chapter of ARMA, visit https://www.chattanooga-arma.org/.