You are right - those are complex questions!  A humble attempt at addressing 
them:

1. If ephemeral contact information has been used later for meaningful 
business purposes, I would question that they're ephemeral.  It sounds more 
like an issue with organizing the information.  I would suggest that a system 
be set up to manage customer relations - whether that's CRM software or RIM 
software or some more manual process.

2. Is there a product that can present users with big (or massive) buckets?  
Yes, and most likely all of them, depending on how they are configured.  There 
are a lot of tools that tie in to Outlook and provide a wide range of 
functionality.  I've not used them all; it's worth it to make some calls, attend 
some webinars, and visit the exhibition floor at the conference (and I'm not 
even a vendor! :) )

3. Dealing with the keep-it-forever mentality is a tough one.  It seems to be 
driven by a strangely optimistic sense that, if not now, then very soon 
software will exist that cheaply and easily finds the exact information you 
need everytime - it is, perhaps, a Google effect.  In reality it doesn't exist, 
and (at least cheaply and easily) won't exist for a long time.  I respond to 
that mentality with a) the cost of keeping information forever, which goes 
beyond storage costs to backup costs, ediscovery costs (more for expensive 
lawyers to search through), and data maintenance costs, and b) the risk of 
keeping information forever - especially with contact information, there may 
be privacy issues on permanent retention (depending on what's retained).  
You might ask IT their total data maintenance costs and divide it by the 
number of GB in storage (some IT departments use it as a metric already) to 
give a sense of the cost of data.

Often the reasons for wanting to KIF are rooted in a lack of trust.  Your 
organization is relatively new, and there may never have been a solid, 
trustworthy, effective filing system in any department where employees knew 
things were taken care of and they could get what they needed.  You may 
need to walk the long road building trust, creating good filing systems in 
limited deployments, until the org learns to give in to the RIM way.  Eventually 
they may learn that KIF costs far more in the long run than effective filing, 
retention, and disposition.

Hope this helps!

Wayne Hoff, CRM
Calgary, AB

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