On Product Development and More...

Recently, I was talking to a friend who works for a large multinational. The conversation drifted towards Electronic Discovery and Information Management, two topics that I had been living and breathing for the past year.

To no surprise, the Information Explosion has hit larger companies particularly hard.

A person who is not familiar the challenges of managing large amounts of information might think - shouldn't a large multinational which invests millions of dollars in Information Technology have a solution to address the eDiscovery conundrum? Well. Yes and no. While these companies might be adept at information technology (having invested a lot of money in IT), they also have significant challenges:
- First, they create a lot of information
- Second, and more importantly, they oftentimes lack the necessary processes to effectively manage that information

Interestingly, last year, I attended a conference sponsored by the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (aka ARMA, Intl) and spoke with a Records Manager from that same company. We discussed the challenges with the growth of information and the need for active information management. One obvious solution is to reduce the amount of information retained so as to minimize the amount of information subject to electronic discovery.

However, rather than implementing a holistic Information Management solution, this Record Manager indicated that the company had only implemented tactical solutions to this ever-growing problem. My friend and I speculated that upwards of 25% of her company's data is now subject to one or more legal holds.

For a smaller company, with under 100TB of information, this could be acceptable. But what happens to the larger companies, with petabytes of information? That is constantly involved in litigation?

Hopefully, companies will wake up and realize the importance of:
- Establishing a set of rules for classifying our information and
- Adopting a policy for managing that information based upon its classification

Before it's too late.