Dr. Stephen Covey reminded us that “important” is not the same thing as “urgent.” Records retention reminds us that important is not the same thing as exciting. I get it – records retention schedules are boring. But the fact remains that literally thousands of records retention requirements apply to your organization’s information. I know, because my firm finds and tracks these laws as part of our many years of retention schedule work for clients across industries. And your regulators expect you to know them too.Continue Reading Why govern your information? Reason #11: Thousands of federal and state records retention laws apply to your company
Why govern your information? Reason #12: Unnecessary business data causes unnecessary litigation costs
“If your clients don’t have a records management system, they may as well take their money out into the parking lot and set it on fire.”
– U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge John Facciola (now retired, and missed)
We all know that ediscovery is expensive, and various research reports have so confirmed. The 2012 Rand study, Where the Money Goes: Understanding Litigant Expenditures for Producing Electronic Discovery, found that median costs for collection, processing, and review are $17,507 per gigabyte (roughly 3,500 documents or 10,000 e-mails). The math is not pretty – a case involving 482 GBs of source data could exceed $8 million in ediscovery costs.
And on top of that are preservation costs. The 2014 Preservation Costs Survey demonstrated that large companies incur significant fixed costs for preservation (for in-house ediscovery personnel and also for procurement and maintenance of legal hold management and data preservation technology systems), averaging $2.5 million annually. More significant is the cost of employee time lost in complying with legal holds. While companies with up to 10,000 employees incur the average time cost of over $428,000 per year, costs for the largest companies exceed $38 million per year.
There is indeed great complexity in how to cost-effectively process huge amounts of data through the ediscovery funnel. Tighter management of ediscovery processes is important, and TAR continues to be a promising alternative to traditional review, with significant cost-savings potential.
But as we ponder how to cut costs, let’s not forget to use Occam’s razor:
Continue Reading Why govern your information? Reason #12: Unnecessary business data causes unnecessary litigation costs
The politics of information governance
It’s certainly been a wild, heated presidential race. Information governance has remained at center stage, ever since President Obama’s successful 2008 rallying cry, “Data We Can Believe In.” And the 2016 candidates have followed suit, with Bernie Sanders’ “What We Need is an Information Revolution,” Hilary Clinton’s “Information for America,” and Jeb Bush’s succinct slogan: “Data!”
But no candidate has tapped into the electorate’s visceral hopes and fears for information governance with more gusto than Donald Trump. As election day nears, it’s time to take a closer look at Mr. Trump’s positions on managing information compliance, cost, risk, and value.
I’m calling for a total and complete shutdown of data entering our computer systems, until our IT representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.
Why people ignore security advice, and what to do about it
By now, you’ve surely heard about the hack of the Democratic National Committee that gathered thousands of email messages, the contents of which were exposed by WikiLeaks and ultimately caused Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign. But did you also know that only last fall, the DNC commissioned a two-month security risk assessment that yielded dozens of recommendations to improve the security of its network? The real story is what happened next.
Continue Reading Why people ignore security advice, and what to do about it
All we really need to know about Information Governance we learned in kindergarten
Sometimes we make things way too complicated – especially our relationship with business data. Allow me to “kidnap” Robert Fulghum’s classic poem – wisdom in effectively governing information compliance, cost, risk, and value is not found exclusively at the top of the data science mountain, but there in the sandpile at kindergarten. Here are the things we learned there:
Continue Reading All we really need to know about Information Governance we learned in kindergarten
People don’t have data problems ….
Poor data. Though more essential to business than ever before, data is simultaneously frustrating for its inaccessibility, intimidating in its volume and complexity, distrusted for its unreliability, maligned for its management costs, and feared for its litigation, privacy, and security risks.
But let’s not cast business data as the culprit. Data is basically inert. It sits where we store it, goes where we send it, does what we (or some system programmer) tell it to do, and is as secure as the safeguards we provide. Data is not the “actor” – good, bad, or indifferent. We are.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we can see that most every problem we experience with business data has its root in what people do, or fail to do, as individuals, work teams, or organizations:Continue Reading People don’t have data problems ….