We’ve heard the clichés: “Information is our greatest asset”; “We live in an information economy”; “Information is the lifeblood of our organization.” Sadly, what used to be all about collaboration and user productivity is now, in many organizations, about protecting against lawsuits.
The reasons are clear: Courts have upheld that all electronic information is discoverable, meaning virtually everything in an organization can be used in a lawsuit. Risk management is now a higher priority than user productivity. As a result, corporations are forced to overspend to ensure they can find documents and prove they have adequate records retention processes. As I heard frequently last week at LegalTech, an event where lawyers and IT people come together, some organizations have even resorted to keeping everything electronic, forever.
Not only is this approach expensive, it’s not sustainable, for three reasons:
1) Costs of storing all electronic records forever is increasing and will continue to increase, forever.
2) E-discovery expenses are directly related to the amount of data retained -- and these costs are skyrocketing.
3) Keeping documents forever increases legal risk by creating opportunities for adversarial counsel to misuse information and rewrite history.
I’ve written here before on why "archive everything" strategies are doomed and how personal information
is exploding and needs to be approached differently. I’m more convinced than ever that today’s email archiving and e-discovery systems can’t support the future.
I found two startups recently that I believe are pointing the way, however. Digital Reef is a Massachusetts-based company that, according to VP of marketing Brian Giuffrida, is shipping production versions of software that auto-discovers, indexes, and classifies large amounts of unstructured data -- quickly, across formats and distributed locations.
Rational Retention is a New York-based company. The firm’s COO, Michael McCreary, who used to head Pfizer’s Legal IT group, told me that it uses lightweight agents sitting on PCs, in file shares, email servers, and document management systems to extract metadata for every user-created document. The metadata is used by a centralized system to manage documents across their entire lifecycles.
The key to these companies’ vision is that they recognize that shoving all documents into a central archive is too expensive, doesn’t scale, and won’t adequately protect organizations. Rather, these firms are creating “virtual repositories” and managing information where the content lives -- on desktops, laptops, mobile devices, wikis, etc.
Rising storage and e-discovery costs and the exposure involved with keeping data forever will drive customers from centralized compliance archives toward a decentralized “preserve in place” model. Fundamental technology enablers include the following:
Auto-classification at the point of content creation
Powerful search
An architecture that uses endpoint device intelligence
Centralized metadata repositories that communicate with a policy engine to make decisions at the OS and application levels
The result will be a far more cost-effective, automated, command-and-control decision-making capability, supporting a distributed, mobile, heterogeneous workforce. I expect this vision will eventually allow us to get back to thinking about information as an asset and not a liability.
— David Vellante is a co-founder of ITCentrix, Barometrix, and The Wikibon Project.
adblah, I couldn't agree more and that is the central premise of my post. But the devil as they say is in the details. My understanding is the law and regulations on records retention are pretty narrow in fact. Most of what we have doesn't need to be retained unless there's a legal hold on a 'topic.' For example, let's say a pharma is getting sued in relation to Cox-2 inhibitors. All emails and docs pertaining to that topic must be retained. The challenge is to preserve those documents in place and/or dramatically reduce the capacity and time required to archive those documents; AND (this is very important) being able to defensibly delete those docs.
We're starting to see two broad approaches emerge to deal with this problem: 1) new technologies to dramatically streamline archiving and make central repositories smaller and easier to search and 2) technologies that enable a 'preserve in place' model that allows the life cycle of a document to be managed where it lives.
The key enabler to both of these approaches is auto-classification technologies that extend the capabilities of today's approaches. Vector algorithms that dramatically increase the number of categorical dimensions seem to be pointing the way.
These are very challenging inventions-- not trivial.
It is important that in trying to better information management, we let what we "need" lead the way. The idea's and comments shared here are well and good, but to let lawyers determine the way to manage IT information is not right.
User's cannot afford to bear cost of keeping information just because a lawyer will want that. Of course it is important that what is needed is kept and what is of no use, discarded.
Clearly, if it is of no use, it wouldn't help the lawyer anyway so why hang on to it at a cost? I am definitely not saying people should disobey the law, for if the law says a company must keep some information, then the company 'needs' that information and must keep it.
Lets work to keep information management relevant to the times.
Well put Deborah. Information as liability and information as asset have been in a tug of war for several years now. Context as you suggest is crucial to value and classification is the mainspring of context. Auto-classification is the enabler to successful scaling of these systems.
I totally agree that we need to do a much better job of organizing and managing data in order to reduce the cost and complexity of megasystem storage.
The companies and technology tools that you mention are great support systems for moving that direction. It also reminds us that the technology still has to be managed in order to get the benefits from it.
I still believe that information is our most valuable asset. It is up to us to create systems that optimize the information while managing the cost of creating and organizing data and turning it into quality information that betters our decision making and corporate performance. We need good management to keep it in context and to create the value that will make it an asset.
To Dave's point, corporations need to get smarter about how they manage unstructured data - in particular email and other esi. A save everything strategy is expensive and potentially risky. To rsheel's point, users tend to be pack rats. So having a robust policy management engine and supporting software that can manage esi at the point of creation is key. Sadly many of the larger message archiving vendors in the space are focused more on integration of modules and acquiring additional companies to fill out their portfolio of products. However, this provides an opportunity for start ups who have developed truly innovative products to fill in the holes for IT staff attempting to improve performance and manageability with an eye on lowering costs and improving ROI.
It's even more insidious rsheel. Lawyers are now driving the strategy, not the business. It's understandable but not sustainable in my view. Attorneys need to make sure they can discover everything electronic. Hence the legal requirement to archive everything.
The key is to find ways to defensibly delete documents that aren't needed. Technology got us into this problem and the good news is technology and process can help us get out.
Its 'pack-rat' in every one of us that forces us to keep all the data archived. It’s an interesting human psychology that forces individuals to keep all the data. Or is it lack of time. Since you don’t have time to check and see what's relevant, do we archive everything? But the downside of that is there is no way to retrieve those old data. What happens to data in 5 1/4 inch floppy drive? As technology becomes obsolete, we will be forced to discard information that cannot be retrieved.
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