Retention schedules are essential in bringing order to a company’s complicated, chaotic information environment. Whether they succeed in doing so depends largely on whether they are structured properly. So, the age-old question is, what’s the best way to go – organizing the schedule by department/group, or by information content types?
The answer is both, plus an absolutely crucial element that’s missing from the question – the information’s context.Continue Reading Keeping data in context
Having too much data causes problems beyond needless storage costs, workplace inefficiencies, and uncontrolled litigation expenses. Keeping data without a legal or business reason also exacerbates data security exposures. To put it bluntly, businesses that tolerate troves of unnecessary data are playing cybersecurity roulette … with even larger caliber ammunition.
Continue Reading Why govern your information? Reason #9: Unnecessary business data multiplies data security exposures
Most enterprise information governance initiatives are event-driven: an expensive lawsuit, a system migration, a board or regulatory inquiry, a corporate move, and so on. Though there’s nothing wrong with being opportunistic in making IG progress, it can sometimes be too little, too late when a cybersecurity breach or some catastrophic event shines the light on decades of inattention. How then do we become more proactive in improving how we manage information—arguably any company’s most valuable asset?
Inertia is a powerful thing. It keeps us from exercising regularly, from cleaning the garage, and myriad other “honey do’s.” Not to mention the personal distractions of football, basketball, kids’ soccer, social media, Internet surfing, and just plain hanging out. When we translate this combination of inertia and distraction to the workplace, however, our “home” selves get in the way of our “business” selves and organizational best interest. It’s just too easy to put off examination of what is an increasingly consequential business need: ensuring compliance, managing risk, and extracting value from our information. Effort is required.Continue Reading The crystallization of discontent: Finding the uber-ROI for information governance
At least, that is, unless overheard, written, or recorded. Just ask anyone following the presidential campaigns. Absent concrete evidence, spoken words evaporate and any discussion of them quickly devolves into the type of “he said, she said” game usually seen in low-budget television courtroom dramas and on playgrounds. A few weeks ago, my colleague Peter Sloan posted All we really need to know about Information Governance we learned in kindergarten. Let’s ponder an additional learning point from Mr. Fulgham:
When you go out into the world, watch for traffic.
Continue Reading Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me….
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
“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
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.
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
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 ….