(PRWEB) April 25, 2011
San Jose, CA Two of the metrics Executive Management uses to measure the effectiveness of IT Leaders are: 1. How significantly has he/she cut costs. 2. Does he/she drive value for the business in such a way as to impact our bottom line? E-discovery and Archiving solutions are two applications Corporate I.T. have attempted to deliver to drive real business value for the enterprise. While archiving and e-discovery tools are great, much of the potential business impact that can be had is lost due to a lack of awareness or education of the parties involved.
According to the 2009 Litigations Trend Survey by Fulbright and Jaworski, an international law firm, over 52% of U.S. corporations are still outsourcing all of their e-discovery with only 48% performing “some e-discovery” activities. At an average cost of $ 250-$ 500/hour for manual legal discovery and forensics, its simple work for the typical consultant or software reseller to perform an ROI model for the I.T. Department to justify Legal Discovery tools. Lump that in with an IT Managers desire to eliminate mailbox quotas, eliminate PSTs, and to have the ammo necessary to reduce the companys unstructured data footprint by 40% plus and the results are an eclectic mix of half-baked archiving and e-discovery solutions deployed that create marginal value at best for the business.
Archiving solutions like Symantecs Enterprise Vault, Iron Mountains Nearpoint and EMCs SourceOne are all excellent data archiving and data management platforms. Yet while each solution is very effective in helping IT realize their infrastructure benefits of storage reclamation, improved data management and administration, and a reduced storage footprint; I.T. Departments (IT) are all too often narrowly missing the opportunity to drive real business value to their peers on the Legal side of the house by showcasing the associated sister e-discovery products of these vendors and their ability to bring in all data sources into their archive. E-discovery Tools like Symantecs Discovery Accelerator, Iron Mountain Enterprise Discovery Suite and EMCs SourceOne Kazeon solutions with work flow and case management capability can only be as effective as its adopters make these tools.
Though it seems reasonable that an e-discovery solution would be selected by the combined efforts of Legal and I.T., perhaps much in the same way one would expect the Sales Department and IT teams to select a CRM application or Accounting and IT to select a billing application, what seems to be more common practice with archiving and e-discovery is that IT is selecting the archiving application and adopting the packaged e-discovery application for the selected archiving solution. The idea being that the discovery application will either benefit the Legal team eventually or that it will meet ITs objectives of magically delivering content quickly when Legal submits their request (perhaps unsuspectingly pleasing their requestors) and thereby convincing their Legal counterparts of the fact that I.T. made a great investment for the business.
Data Archiving and E-discovery, can it be one without the other? At the onset of the Data Archiving there were so many benefits to realize that not making a decision for Data Archival was just plain silly. IT leaders found an inexpensive and effective way to eliminate mailbox quotas and improve user satisfaction; to reclaim storage and eliminate hardware costs; to shrink Exchanges stores and speed up Mail Server migrations or upgrades. As a result, many early adopters purchased the mail and file management modules of these archiving solutions and received the associated benefits. However, as time went on the discovery capabilities of these archiving solutions were evolving and making use of the already embedded features of searching, indexing, single instancing, Boolean search capabilities and future proofing (i.e. the ability to convert file formats into html renderings to ensure long term viability should an application end of life). Although the evolution of data archival and e-discovery have led to a convergence of sorts within each vendors solution set, our consultants have noticed an increased level of dissatisfaction with a sole sourced solution. As a result, activity has increased in looking at alternative solutions for the discovery component, versus the incumbent vendor, even when customers are generally satisfied with the archiving solution.
Even up to a few years ago it was common place for IT to want to eliminate Legal from the decision making process, as it related to archiving solutions. Today it has become the exception more than the rule that Legal is not invited into these conversations. Although Legal is now generally involved in the selection process, it never ceases to amaze me how often Legal is willing to be a bystander or a witness and little more. More common, has been that Legal will endorse the use of the discovery tools but will leave them in the hands of IT to administer and deliver content. This seems to me, as odd as, having a billing application selected by IT and Accounting where Accounting has the IT Help Desk entering Receivables which they will rely on to sustain their business (a stretch perhaps but something to consider nonetheless).
Though I am not an attorney, nor do I have any Legal training, I have had a number of opportunities to sit with Legal Counsel and provide extensive overviews of the features and capabilities of e-discovery applications. The interest is to educate the users of these applications on how to use the tools but not to set policy nor define best practice. My experience has been that they all too often, even after years of possessing an e-discovery tool of choice that work flow has not been adopted, the administrators are barely aware of how to configure the application and that the tool is used to retain far more than is necessary and often times the review process has not even been leveraged. And though the results do glean some benefits far more could be recognized and more value can be delivered to the business.
So what are the steps I.T. can take to help Legal realize value for the business?
Keeping in mind that driving value for Legal will mean reducing their expenses to outside counsel. There are 4 very practical recommendations I make to clients who find themselves in this position.
1.)
