Paper - iPres 2013 - Lisbon

Until now, digital preservation research has been mainly driven by public or publicly funded organisations. 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 deficien-cies 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 pre-serve specific digital objects, making digital preservation not an option, but a legal obligation. While in the case of cultural herit-age 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 manage-ment can be linked to digital preservation and how intelligent enterprise risk management can be utilised to identify the need for digital preservation, determine the corresponding actions, and contribute to the overall commercial success of enterprises.

Digital Preservation, Intelligent Enterprise Risk Management, Commercial Use of digital preservation, iPRES, Lisbon

application/pdf