Systems Management

Archive for the ‘Information Management’ Category

Given the explosive growth of electronic information in corporate America, managing electronic discovery is increasingly a challenge for corporate IT departments, in-house and outside counsel, each of whom are stakeholders. In December of 2006, the Judicial Conference of the US amended the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) to clarify the roles, responsibilities and discovery obligations of the various parties to litigation. The amendments, for the first time, made specific reference to electronically stored information, or ESI, as it is now commonly known. The changes in attitudes toward e-discovery are noticeable and the amendments have, without question, helped create an unprecedented level of dialog and collaboration to understand how electronic information is created, used, managed and disposed of in the corporate environment.

Why, then, have the amendments, intended to reduce confusion, also introduced a level of complexity to the e-discovery process that has left a lot of people scratching their heads?

For example, corporate counsel in a defense posture is keyed in on everything from creating corporate data maps to handling multiple and complex litigation holds, as well as establishing repeatable and defensible guidelines for discovery. What happens the following week when the storage administrator retires a key server and implements his data consolidation strategy? How good is the data map then?

Records retention managers have also been significantly affected. For years, they have been seen as silent corporate operatives who had murky roles and dealt with boxes of old documents. Today, nothing could be further from the truth. They are on the front lines of protecting an organization from a data management policy perspective.

Another role that has seen significant evolution is that of the “storage administrator.” Corporate data storage administrators are IT personnel whose roles are largely characterized by their knowledge of an organization’s data growth and proliferation patterns – key factors that allow them to make recommendations as to how, when and if an organization’s data management hardware and associated software platforms need modification or change.

Another driver is the evolution of technology for e-discovery to serve both proactive and reactive use cases. The vast majority of matters today are addressed in a reactive fashion with a mind to quickly address pressing, active concerns that demand rapid retrieval of responsive ESI for early case assessments, meet and confer and other matter-specific requirements. However, the future is clear in that there is a need for consistent, repeatable and targeted e-discovery processes that can also be deployed across a company, creating an “e-discovery ready,” proactive environment.

Therefore, the answer may lie in the fact that while the amendments impose obligations on the parties, they don’t specifically state how one should go about fulfilling them. When it comes to corporations today, the old silo-based information management paradigms will not work when it comes to information discovery of any kind, for any reason. The bottom line is: litigation, storage management/data consolidation, records retention, regulatory responses, internal investigations, information security initiatives, personnel policy management, business intelligence, data mining, compliance and monitoring are all effectively subsets of what we call “e-discovery.” This new paradigm of e-discovery subsumes many previously compartmentalized departmental initiatives that are under the auspices of legal, IT, records management, HR and finance. It is predicated on the degree to which an organization has information access and the ability to perform effective data classification. In short, companies should be able to leverage enterprise data for multiple business needs from a common underlying information access and classification platform.

We live in an age where information accumulates all around us in seemingly limitless quantities. As individuals we send or receive emails, text messages, photos and sound bytes on an hour-to-hour basis. As corporations, we cram computer hard drives with statistics, contacts, financial transactions, specifications, technical drawings, instructional materials, and employee and customer data. It’s just as well that our technological capability to store information electronically has improved beyond all expectation.

But despite our technological ability to store information there is still so much that simply disappears on a day-to-day basis. Business owners and managers know the cost when an experienced and valuable employee moves on to a new job. It’s often a mad scramble to capture their knowledge and organise an information handover to the new employee. As technologically advanced we may be, you cannot just backup the employee’s brain to a computer hard drive as they leave. It’s likely you’ll soon be a victim of a variation of Murphy’s Law – the information you most need is the information you don’t have!

The continuous cycle of employees joining and leaving, at whatever level, can be a major impediment to organisation learning and the continuous improvement process. Employees are mostly concerned with the here and now rather than leaving trails of information that may benefit their successors. The management of knowledge and information within a business needs a continuous improvement process itself. Although business owners and managers may strive hard to implement, update and ensure the continuity of work systems and processes, there is still a need to foster an organisation culture that promotes the importance of spending time and energy capturing and preserving information and knowledge on a daily basis.

In any work situation, there are always employees that perpetually seek the assistance of colleagues when they need information. They rely on others to be the ‘keepers of knowledge’. They are full of praise when the information is forthcoming and they curse ‘the system’ if information cannot be found. They take little responsibility themselves to contribute to the organisation’s efforts in information management, it’s someone else’s job. At home, they probably have countless thousands of photos, some of them precious, sitting on an aging hard drive that has never been backed up.

Likewise, there are always some employees that seem to be the givers and perpetrators of information. They seem to have an uncanny knack of finding information when asked, or some 6th sense in knowing what information must be kept. But having special powers is not their reality, it’s more a case of good habits and an appreciation of the need to spend time on a daily basis collecting, updating and managing information.

The difference between people’s inclination to manage information is a consequence of training, life experience and human nature. Some people just don’t get the need to do something now if it can be left until tomorrow, or next week. For many people, taking time to store and organise information falls into this category. On any day inside any business, there is likely to be some failure to appropriately store information. While each failure may be relatively insignificant, cumulatively the effect can be considerable, even damaging to the business.