The horns of an e-discovery dilemma

A theme that will recur throughout these discussions is that a massive volume of electronically stored information creates increasingly complex and daunting challenges for organizations around the world. What I’ve noticed in speaking with so many companies is that when most begin to evaluate their situation, they realize they’ve wound up pointedly on the horns of an e-discovery dilemma. (Some of course are fully impaled...)

On one hand, information must be secured and retained, or else face fines and sanctions (and bad publicity) associated with the seemingly willful destruction of electronic evidence. On the other hand by simply saving everything ever created in the organization, companies substantially drive up the cost and risk they’ll incur later. The corporate cost associated with litigation and the e-discovery process directly correlates to the volume of content retained.

This is where I start to see customer needs converge – organizations wonder: "What can we do to start purging unimportant information, in a timely but responsible manner?" At Open Text this was one of the concepts we considered when scoping out the most recent release of Open Text Email Management for Microsoft Exchange. There’s really two equally important aspects to it. One, disposing of this so-called "transitory information" must be done in a standardized and consistent fashion—in other words, in both good faith and in the context of a systemized approach to records management. But two, it also needs to take into consideration the business user—in other words, the person who might be using this information to get his or her daily job done. Users should always have a mechanism to identify information that is relevant to the company or useful in one’s day-to-day work—and most importantly, they can benefit themselves from an inbox that has some sense and structure to its contents, and one that periodically is alleviated of unimportant information automatically—the clutter that gets in our way when we’re trying to find that one critical email in a hoard of hundreds or even thousands.

They are not easy questions to answer: how much email should we keep? How long should we keep it? It’s a balancing act of risk tolerance. But it is the place I see most organizations starting from these days. They are understanding that indiscriminately capturing everything and saving it “forever” is an unsustainable practice.