Leveraging DP in Commercial Contexts through ERM

Abstract

Until now, digital preservation research has been mainly driven by public or publicly funded organizations. The justification of costs for the preservation is based on abstract risks such as the risk of losing cultural heritage information, or the risk of data deficiencies for current and future research in big sets of data. Typically, the benefits from digitally preserving the objects of interest is difficult or impossible to quantify in terms of return-on-invest. In fact, it is common that memory institutions are mandated to preserve specific digital objects, making digital preservation not an option, but a legal obligation. While in the case of cultural heritage and scientific research qualitative reasons for preservation suffice, enterprises have an additional obligation to quantify the expected benefits and expenses in order to determine the scope of information to be managed and take commercial decisions for or against digital preservation. To provide appropriate means for leveraging the benefits of digital preservation in a commercial context, we argue in this paper that enterprise risk managers are the established function to assess and support decisions about preservation in enterprises. We show that enterprise risk management can be linked to digital preservation and how intelligent enterprise risk management can be utilized to identify the need for digital preservation, determine the corresponding actions, and contribute to the overall commercial success of enterprises.