Being An Informationist: eDiscovery

A big idea reprised: in tomorrow's IT world, there will be informationists and technologists. 

Informationists will understand the value of information; technologists will provide the supporting environment that informationists need. 

And -- quite likely -- the value will shift to informationists over time.

For me, nothing quite illustrates this thought quite as well as EMC's recent offerings around eDiscovery. 

Not only is it a compelling application in its own right today, but I see it as a harbinger of more interesting things to come.

Some Background

Does your company deal with lawsuits? 

Does a bear ... well, never mind.

If you're an IT leader, and you've never spent quality time with your legal group understanding how they respond to lawsuits -- well, maybe you should.

Not surprisingly, an enormous amount of time and effort is spent gathering, analyzing and producing information in response to litigation.  Speed and efficiency really matter.  And -- if you get it wrong -- the stakes are quite high.

I think it's safe to say that -- in the future -- there will be many more lawsuits -- and much more information that's part  of the legal process.  This isn't going away anytime soon ...

If you're in the United States (or do business here), you've probably come across the US Federal Rules of Civil  Procedure, or FRCP.  Simply put, they say that *all* electronic information is "discoverable" and must be preserved in the event of litigation.

Note that this isn't limited to just emails, folks.

Gartner says that the average cost to support an eDiscovery-type case is $1.5 million.  How many lawsuits does your company get involved in? 

And Forrester claims that less than 20% of companies claim to be "well prepared" for eDiscovery issues. 

I have this mental picture of the IT guys madly scurrying for old backup tapes as a proxy for “well prepared”.

And, finally -- not that this should matter -- but the legal departments that I've met have pretty good budgets.

How It Works

The EMC eDiscovery solution starts with "harvesting" -- passive "thindexing" of every file share, email, PST file, SharePoint instance, document repository, etc. that you can point it to.  We've partnered with StoredIQ for this capability -- it can "thindex" something like 20TB per day.   The "thindex" gets used to identify areas where you want more metadata (full text search, for example) which takes longer.

Now, when that next lawsuit comes in, a very fine-grained search can quickly be applied to find any relevant information in the landscape.  If a given piece of information "of interest" (either determined automatically, or through human viewing), it can be "preserved" using EMC's Centera leveraging the unique litigation and compliance features.  More feature-rich requirements are met using Documentum as a "content backbone".

This speed of discovery is turning out to be a big advantage -- the faster you can figure out what your position might be in a particular matter, the better. 

At the end of the process, the production of all relevant documents is automated as well.

Finally -- and I think this is the best part -- EMC has assembled a specialty consulting team for eDiscovery that  have corporate legal backgrounds (rather than technologists) which is turning out to be very important in bridging the gap between corporate legal groups and IT.

Why I Think This Is So Interesting

First, it's a growing problem for many large corporations.  And, in terms of ROI on IT projects, this one is pretty hard to beat.

Second, it leverages not only EMC's capabilities, but those of our partners.  That's a good thing.

But -- what really intrigues me is that this is a shining example of an information-centric application -- one that has to be absolutely agnostic to the form and location of the information. 

And -- done well -- it has the potential to hit the "justification trifecta" -- save money, avoid risk and create new value.

Thinking A Bit Further

Now, imagine this same technology stack could be used for other -- similar purposes?  Let's speculate a bit ...

How about a "knowledge mining application" that allowed authorized users to sift through -- and assemble -- and preserve -- collections of documents (after the fact) that contain unique IP around product or process?

Or, if you’re like many companies, how about gathering and assembling "customer information" across just about every information source in the company that's not a database?

Or, perhaps, discovering unauthorized use of corporate IT resources for things like mp3s?  Or videos?

The ability to pre-index just about anything sitting just about anywhere -- and then search / sift / categorize on demand -- and then flexibly process or preserve what you find interesting -- well, that could be a useful capability, couldn't it?

Interested?

I am. 

If you are too, there’s lots to go look at, including this press release, this micro-site, a neat demo video that's pretty well done, a customer facing preso, and -- of course -- Andy Cohen's blog -- as he's leading this initiative for EMC.

Sure, it's a great thing to start helping the corporate legal team be more effective.

But I think it's even a better thing to start being an informationist ...

Comments

[Scott Quick]

Hi Chuck,

I've forwarded your post to Charlie Davidson, CEO at Attensa. I've also reached out to Andy to connect the two of them together. You might want drop a call into him. Cheers, SQ.