Web Governance Strategy

We talk a lot on the Vamosa blog about  website compliance and content compliance, the importance of it and the cost implications of a company not complying. But I thought that rather than just take our word for it, it would be good to highlight some recent blogs and articles on the topic…

Gartner Research Report ‘MarketScope for E-Discovery Software Product Vendors’ by Debra Logan Whit Andrews and John Bace

The main areas of cost reduction are on processing data by external service providers and less time and therefore money spent on outside attorney review, as less material is passed to them. These benefits are achieved by defensibly culling the amount of data that is passed on to further steps in the e-discovery process, by allowing in-house attorneys to ‘go back to the well’ and refine their searches, coming up with either more data (to avoid sanctions) or to refine existing data sets to the relevant documents to pass on for further consideration.

ZDNet Blog, ‘Ten emerging Enterprise 2.0 technologies to watch,’ Posted by Dion Hinchcliff. Automated compliance monitoring.

One of the less discussed but more important (and often unstated) objections to Enterprise 2.0, especially for public companies and regulated industries, is ensuring that their use is compliant with all local and foreign laws, rules, and regulations. When any worker can easily disseminate information across an entire organization, or even across the world, some organizations want to be aware of problematic situations before they occur. While social media policy for workers has evolved steadily to provide upfront guidance, many companies still want to ensure they can detect compliance violations as quickly as possible before they become an actual problem. Unfortunately, it’s all too common for FRCP, Sarbanes-Oxley, European Union Privacy Laws, HIPAA, eDiscovery, etc. to be somewhat neglected in E2.0 discussions, where most of the focus initially is on benefit and not potential risk. The good news is that even though most large firms using social media today don’t actively police their users (IBM is a good example of this), I do find that most firms that already have automated compliance tools like CompliantPro are usually covered. However, expect that compliance will become an increasingly important feature of Enterprise 2.0 platforms…

Gartner Blog ‘A Whole Lotta Lawyers’, Posted by Debra Logan

Electronically stored information(ESI) is a HOT topic in legal circles and most lawyers don’t know all that much about it, or if they do, are concerned with making use of it in any way they can, offensively or defensively.  The problem these days is naturally compounded by the sheer volume of the stuff.  With companies being in the state they are regarding the proper management of information, lawyers can no longer conduct exhaustive searches of all that is available.  In large class action suits (think of the tobacco litigation) there are millions upon millions of individual items that might be considered, millions of items to find, and millions to produce.  It cannot be done without technology, certainly.

e-Discovery Journal ‘What is Information Governance?’,  by Barry Murphy

Information is the lifeblood of businesses; you’ve heard term “information economy,” I hope.  I like to talk about information as the fuel on which businesses run.  Taking that analogy further, raw information assets are like oil – they need to be converted into fuel that can make an engine run; in the case of business, that fuel is knowledge.  A decade ago, knowledge management was all the rage, but very few organizations were able to measure the business benefit of implementing knowledge management systems.

Gartner Blog ‘What is Information Governance? And Why is it So Hard?‘, Posted by Debra Logan

These days, there is the added complication of ‘compliance’, an all purpose stick with which everyone uses to beat everyone else and mostly has resulted in even more reluctance to manage information in any way other than simply allowing it to accumulate for fear that deleting it is forbidden by some obscure law or regulation.    Lawyers have been increasingly dragged into the discussions about information governance and that usually complicates matters, rather than makes them simpler.  Most legal counsel do not know exactly what business documents must be preserved, in every case.  If there is pending litigation, its easy enough, and that they do understand.  Otherwise, they lob the ball back into the business user’s court and the circular arguments begin again.

Ensuring content compliance and e-Discovery should be a top priority for every enterprise. With this comes the need to set content governance and procedures to protect your company against the potential risks and financial losses.







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