It’s always difficult to get money for something like ILM because it’s like almost an esoteric topic. Well, you know, it’s about data, it’s about information. Why should I care? What you really want to do is to tie those things into, uh, high impact areas that other departments care about. For example, one of the biggest issues today is how do you manage all of the different people that can see data. HIPAA requirements are, especially the new HIPAA omnibus requirements that are about to fall, uh, towards the end of 2013, what will happen there is everybody is now a business associate. Even if they didn’t — even if they weren’t before, they are now a business associate.

How do you track that? How do you make sure that, uh, all of the business associate compliance records are in place? You can say that ILM governance is going to take care of that. So it’s something that nobody wants to do. The ILM team can say, “You know what? We’re going to take that action because anybody who can see this data needs to be part of a, uh, business associate chain. We can help you with compliance. We can help you maintain that, manage that, and take it forward.”

Another area you can look at is, uh, audit and compliance. If you can — if you can say that, hey, the ILM team will help ensure auditing and compliance through our — all of the work that we have to do through archiving anyway, that gives you another really nice approach to be able to do that. Lots and lots of, uh, CIOs have a major task on their plate called systems integration. Systems integration starts first and foremost with data integration.

So if you can show that the ILM investment is going to help with systems integration, now you’ve solved someone else’s problem. So a great way to make sure that you can get the proper investment in ILM is to be sure that you demonstrate high impact areas in other peoples’ departments that are not naturally yours, but that you can take on simply because you now have a more central authority, you now have a more central role, you’ve got the proper governance in place. Uh, so you can’t just go ask for money and you can’t just go ask for people with that and not — and say that, uh, it’s just for me. You want to make sure that it looks like it’s for other departments, it’s for other, uh, high impact areas, uh, so that you can get that investment, uh, dollars that you’re asking for.