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Tattle tale, tattle tale, Hang your britches on a nail.

By on March 21, 2013 in Blog, Government, Records Management

One of the things I like about government transparency is it reminds me of the tattle-tale in grade school. I tremble to think about what ‘we don’t know’ but often what we ‘do know’ is bad enough. Although I think government faces basically the same problems as many organizations but they are so massive the weaknesses can illustrate dramatic impacts on the business of government and taxes – oops I mean the costs to government.

Let’s take records management. In a new study, ‘Federal Records Management: Navigating the Storm’ by Meritalk and sponsored by Iron Mountain (registration required for download), they surveyed 100 Federal records management professionals and 100 finance professionals to ascertain the state of current records management, the costs, and the future (pretty bleak I may add).

Some astounding food for thought – and you thought your records management needed help.
• Federal agencies manage 8.4B records government wide
• By 2015 it is estimated they will be managing 20.4B records government wide (an increase of 144%)
• Federal agencies are spending $34.4M on records management – 17% more than allocated
• If records management goes unchecked they will spend an estimated $84.1M by 2015
• They estimate that they lose 18% of their total budget annually due to inefficient records management
• 60% of the finance professionals felt managing records hinders agency performance

Enough of that. What is interesting is the recommendations included better training (43%); more funding (33%); and agency leadership (32%) as the top ways to better manage records. In addition, 41% of Federal records are created in digital format yet managed in paper format! These are the two areas where I am somewhat surprised. Better technology was not listed as a recommendation, and they are managing records that was created digitally in paper format? Ok…. Both would seem to me as high priority areas that can, at least reduce the problem.

Let’s turn this around for your organization (I sincerely hope your records management processes don’t even come close to this scenario). What would you list as a priority for reducing costs and improving processes pertaining to records management? Or, not a problem?

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Planting a flower or a garden – is that your metadata?

By on March 6, 2013 in Blog, Data Security, Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance, Records Management, Search

The other day I was reading a report from a conference (which I didn’t attend) but one of the recommendations was to “liaise with business staff to ensure that the metadata they create is accurate, useful and meaningful”. Now that is a very good objective. I think we can all agree easier said than done.

Metadata appears to be popping up more and more from a business perspective as how it can improve (or bust) applications such as search, records management, protection of data, etc. But there is also an associated organizational information risk associated with metadata – meaning the lack of, erroneous, and/or subjective.

Let’s take it out of the day-to-day context of performing business task and look at it from an enterprise perspective. Is metadata a source of risk? Worst case scenario is a data privacy exposure where confidential information is not found and secured and ends up being posted externally. I think we can all agree that it is a risk and quantifiable. But what about the so called ‘soft’ risks that are not so easily quantifiable? The inability to make corporate decisions based on out-of-date information or information that would be critical to the decision process but it is never found? Or the migration of content where it is done in mass, not based on the content within each item, such as content that should be archived, records that were never declared, data security exposures that are just migrate and not protected? These are just a few examples of how ‘metadata’ can be a corporate risk.

Organizations are planting flowers to address single business issues. But I think in many organizations the information risks are not addressed. In other words no gardens. Does your organization proactively identify and address risks surrounding the metadata issue?

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Where’s the missing link in government?

By on February 11, 2013 in Government, Information Governance, Records Management, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Although this blog focuses around government it highlights an interesting paradox. The first article details the US federal Chief Information Officers Council update on the list of core competencies for training and hiring policies so they can hire personnel that are capable of addressing new technology challenges facing government. The council recently released an updated Clinger-Cohen Core Competencies and Learning Objectives and recommended that every federal agency should include staff with experience in social media, open government, and cloud computing.

The document also includes new “competencies” in IT governance, IT program management leadership, vendor management, cybersecurity, and information assurance strategies and plans. According to the article, “Federal chief information officers should ensure that the knowledge, skills and abilities represented in each competency in this document are resident within their organization for overall staff productivity,” the document said. So far all’s well and good and a step in the right direction.

Switch to another scenario. In an editorial by Steve O’Keeffe, from MeriTalk, he discusses the GAO Report released in late January. What struck me as I read both articles back to back is the apparent lack of integrated agency operational plans and the lack of accountability. Some highlights from Mr. O’Keeffe’s article that are recommended in the first article are noted below.

  • Rampant systems duplication – with 777 supply chain systems, they now need a supply chain system to track their supply chain system inventory
  • Agencies spend 73 percent of “defined” IT budget on maintaining old systems
  • IT Dashboard says almost $12.5 billion in IT projects at risk
  • $3 billion worth of IT projects are without governance
  • Data center diaspora and dollar discrepancies. Only three of 24 agencies submitted data center inventories and only one has a complete consolidation plan
  • Failed IT programs total 2.6 billion

I wonder in a ‘real’ organization how often the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray? Although if you add up IT government agency spending it would probably make our eyes pop (luckily for us no one knows what that amount is), but even on a smaller scale how many companies state corporate direction and then it all falls through the cracks? The government is not alone. It is probably more than we think.

 

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What’s on the top of your list for 2013 Priorities?

By on February 6, 2013 in Big Data, Data Security, Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance, Records Management, Search, SharePoint

We recently completed a survey on the key priorities for executives in 2013 as it relates to any application that requires the use of metadata. The respondents included our clients as well as the broader marketplace. The survey focused on the use of what we call ‘intelligent metadata enabled solutions’. Concept Searching’s Smart Content Framework™, which is supported by automatic semantic metadata tagging, auto-classification, and taxonomy management technologies can be readily extended to not only improve search, but records management, data privacy, migration, and text analytics. The results in some cases surprised us, and others were to be expected.

In the broader marketplace, all respondents indicated improving search was their top priority. Not surprising. The trend forward is interesting with a clear emphasis on managing migration, protection of sensitive information, and the automatic declaration of documents of records with 53% of companies looking to deploy solutions for migration, 51% for sensitive information and data privacy, 27% for records identification, 20% for eDiscovery & FOIA and only 16% for text analytics.

In looking at our clients, 33% have actually deployed the technology for migration, 29% for sensitive information and data privacy, 25% for records identification, 23% for text analytics, and 21% for eDiscovery and FOIA. For all clients, the technology is also being used to improve search, either using Concept Searching’s conceptSearch product or through integration with any search engine such as SharePoint, SOLR, Google Appliance, and the former Microsoft FAST products.

I would be interested in knowing if these results are priorities for your organization and if so, what would be a must have or a nice to have?

The survey results and more about intelligent metadata enabled solutions can be accessed here.

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Costs for eDiscovery – that’s your problem.

By on February 5, 2013 in Data Security, Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance, Records Management

In a recent blog I spoke about the need to save all content generated by any type of social media application for litigation purposes. I recently read another article about a lawsuit where the party that produces documents in a lawsuit must pay the costs of eDiscovery even when it requires expensive retrieval of electronic documentation, an appeals court stated. The gist of the suit was in 2009, U.S. Bank sued GreenPoint Mortgage Funding over some $1.8 billion in subprime mortgage-backed securities GreenPoint issued from 2005-06. The lawsuit claimed that GreenPoint committed “gross violations” of the “representations and warranties regarding the attributes of the loans and the practices and policies under which the loans were originated, underwritten and serviced,” according to the ruling. (If you ask me they should pay for the costs.)

“There has been a movement among other courts, where the cost of discovery production is significant, to adopt the standards articulated by the United States District Court in Zubulake and to place the cost of discovery, including searching for, retrieving and producing ESI (electronically stored information), at least initially, on the producing party,” the court wrote.

The cost of litigation for some companies is enormous. Mostly around the subject of finding, identifying, and organizing all the relevant information to support or defend themselves. With the introduction of ESI one would think it would have become easier than manual identification, but with the amount of content that must be sifted through it is still just as hard, if not harder. We do have clients using our technologies for eDiscovery and litigation support but obviously not all firms or companies use it.

If you are in this field, since I am by no means an expert on ESI, please shed some light on your processes and how you deal with this. It would appear to me that this isn’t an area where you can cut costs.

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eDiscovery – Save those Tweets, Blogs, and Facebook Pages!

By on February 1, 2013 in Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance, Records Management

According to Michelle Sherman, Esq. in an article Social Media Applied she used statistics from a 2010 survey on social media. According to her research, 65% of Fortune Global 100 companies have Twitter accounts, and 54% have Facebook Fan pages. One third had a blog. I’m sure the numbers exceed that now.

What was interesting about the article is that according to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures the above are considered ‘electronically stored information’ (ESI). In a revision in 2006 to include ESI, the term was “intended to be read expansively to include all current and future electronic storage mediums.” Accordingly, even storage in the “cloud” or on a social networking site will be treated as discoverable ESI. “Every firm that intends to communicate, or permit its associated persons to communicate, through social media sites must first ensure that it can retain records of those communications as required by Rules 17a-3 ad 17a-4 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and NASD Rule 3110.”

If you are using social networking tools, do you save the information? If so, for how long? Do you take any special precautions?

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Who deletes content? The business owner or IT?

By on January 14, 2013 in Data Security, Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance, Records Management, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Several months ago I wrote a blog about who in the organization actually owns the content, the ‘business owner’ or IT? I read an excellent article today, ‘A Modern Governance Strategy for Data Disposal’ that touched briefly once again on this topic. According to the author, Lorrie Luellig, “What used to be solely the domain of records management and legal departments is now yet another responsibility for IT, as information experts are asked to identify and protect data that has business, legal or regulatory value, while facilitating the defensible disposal (i.e., deletion) of everything else. This is a critical task—the elimination of “data debris” can have a dramatic impact on compliance, corporate risk and the bottom line.”

According to Ms. Luellig, “At the 2012 Compliance, Governance and Oversight Counsel (CGOC) Summit, a survey of corporate CIOs and general counsels found that, typically, 1 percent of corporate information is on litigation hold, 5 percent is in a records-retention category and 25 percent has current business value. This means that approximately 69 percent of the data most organizations keep can—and should—be deleted.”

The bottom line of course is if organizations can delete 69% of their data, not only does storage go down, but information workers can find relevant information more quickly, and business processes that focus on records management, compliance, etc. can be improved.

She continues to offer several practical suggestions, although some not easy to implement, to address this problem, primarily by improving internal communications, and implementing policies that determine the guidelines for keeping or removing data. It is an excellent article, definitely worth reading.

My point though is who in your organization is responsible for deleting content? The multiple stakeholders or IT?

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What’s Your Priorities for 2013?

By on January 10, 2013 in Big Data, Data Security, Information Governance, Records Management, Search

We recently did a study of the priorities for CIO’s in 2013. The results were interesting. What we found was the highest priorities, in the following order, were improving Search, Migration, Data Privacy, Records Management, eDiscovery & FOIA, followed up in last place was Text Analytics. At this time, no one seems particularly interested in social networking.

I would very much value your input. If you could let me know what your organization’s priorities are for 2013, it would expand our study.

  • Search
  • Migration
  • Data Privacy
  • Records Management
  • eDiscovery & FOIA
  • Social Networking

Thanks for your input!!

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Information Lifecycle Management – What is old is new

By on January 8, 2013 in Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance, Records Management

Information Lifecycle Management. An oldish term that seems to be coming back into style. But what does it really mean? The best definition I found was from SearchStorage and states that Information Lifecycle Management is a comprehensive approach to manage the flow of an information system’s data and associated metadata from creation and initial storage to the time when it becomes obsolete and is deleted Ok, I’ll buy that.

What makes this an interesting topic is how times have changed. Many documents are still in paper format, but typically they can be scanned and placed on the storage site automatically. But many organizations still manually scan, fax, or even copy and mail documents for processing. Hmmmm. An approach with a high degree of potential failure.

In today’s technology environment, information lifecycle management must address multiple channels and origination points to process documents correctly. Effective information lifecycle management today must have the ability to process documents from a variety of sources, and gain the benefits from not only end user productivity, reduced costs, and produce an audit trail to ensure compliance and security. Ok, that can probably be accomplished. But the crux of the matter goes back to metadata. Information cannot be managed from inception to deletion without comprehensive metadata associated with the content.

The lack of quality, meaningful, non-subjective metadata always seems to rear its ugly head.

So what about information lifecycle management? Is this a priority? Have you implemented an approach that works? How have you addressed the accuracy of metadata and have any problems surfaced from the lack of comprehensive metadata?

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Taking Baby Steps or Giant Leaps?

By on November 27, 2012 in Data Security, Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance, Records Management, Search, SharePoint

For more years than I would like to count being in the software business, there has typically been a one dimensional approach to solving business problems with technology. Myriad solutions are available that solve a specific problem, such as search, records management or compliance, but they are typically narrowly focused and not adaptable outside the boundaries of the application. This leaves organizations in a continual state of flux trying to achieve incremental improvements to achieve specific business outcomes with multiple technologies. And there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, in most instances a specific software solution is required to solve a specific challenge.

When discussing the management of unstructured content, the game is a bit different. In this scenario organizations should be looking beyond addressing a single business challenge. If you only want to improve your enterprise search, then it may be more appropriate to deploy a robust search solution. But if you want a more strategic approach that addresses the fundamental problem of capturing meaningful metadata then the approach is different. The extendability and flexibility of the solution should be a key component. With unstructured content, the basic problem has always been metadata. Either a lack of it, subjective, or inconsistent metadata has hampered the ability for organizations to re-use it to improve other applications. The ability to identify semantic metadata on the other hand, leads to the ability to re-use the metadata for diverse applications such as records management, compliance, or migration to name a few.

A good example is the US Air Force Medical Service, who has been a long-time client of ours. They have been unique in their use of our technologies. Initially deployed to improve search outcomes on their intranet portal, they continually surprise us in what they have done. They have expanded the use to include records management, identification and protection of privacy data, compliance, and migration. Who knows what they will think of next?

Anyway hope you get my point about flexibility and extendability of technologies.

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