What does the phrase "I'm going to get you" mean? When uttered by an angry Mafia boss, it can have a dramatically different meaning than when uttered by a mom who just received a call that her daughter isn't feeling well and needs a ride home from school.

In the same way, the content stored in e-mail and other corporate systems has a particular context that can explain much of its meaning. Organizations that have deployed an archiving system have already gone a long way toward solving their information management requirements. Archiving systems permit them to extract necessary data when called upon to satisfy a regulatory audit or legal discovery order, for example. An archiving system can also be used as a repository of corporate knowledge, allowing users to extract information to meet individual, departmental or corporate goals.

Another benefit of a repository of information, however, such as an e-mail archive or a live message store, is the ability to understand the context of the data and to derive value from it. For example, the metadata associated with individual e-mail messages or other data can provide added value for decision-making or other knowledge management activities.

Clearwell Systems, for example, provides the ability to view the context of e-mail discussion threads, allowing users to understand when messages were sent, to identify critical conversations within these threads and to extract other useful contextual information. FAST InStream for Data Classification is another tool in use by a number of firms and allows archived data, as well as active data in a variety of systems, to have its metadata, concepts and other information indexed and analyzed and then integrated with a variety of business processes.

The advantage of these tools and others is that they allow information to be made available for improved corporate decision making, providing additional context surrounding this data to make it even more valuable.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.