Can eDiscovery Be a Driver for Culture Change?
I’ve been involved in several recent debates about whether organizations should do whatever it takes to allow workers to create and share information assets or whether strict limitations should be put on information usage. Theoretically (especially in an information-driven economy), organizations should strive to provide an infrastructure that allows users to easily create, find, share, collaborate on, publish, and transact information. That’s the theory behind what Forrester Research calls the “Information Workplace.”
In practice, though, there are barriers to providing such a free infrastructure. First, from a cost perspective, it’ s not cheap to put such an infrastructure in place. Over the last decade, many organizations turned to enterprise content management (ECM) suites in the hopes of creating an environment where information could flow freely. But, these tools proved to be non-user friendly – only 20% of ECM licenses sold ever get deployed (that’s quite a sunk cost).
So, if much of the information throughout an organization is not within a content management system, then a serious problem exists – the fact that the information is not managed means it is difficult to find. Because of eDiscovery, finding, processing, and reviewing this information could cost millions of dollars. As I’ve mentioned before, many organizations turn to archiving solutions to get many of the high-volume sources of information under some kind of management control. But, the problem that arises next is dealing with the culture of an organization where employees are used to keeping things like emails as long as they want in the format they want (e.g. PST).
Thus, IT is often left being the scapegoat for all information related problems – users blame IT when email is disposed of according to company policy (saying they’ve lost important knowledge assets), and legal comes down hard on IT when all potentially responsive data needs to be collected for eDiscovery (usually, IT cannot do this quickly enough, or cost-effectively enough, to satisfy legal).
Savvy IT folks (and the legal and compliance officers they work closely with) are allowing the issues involved with eDiscovery to help them create culture change within their organizations. Getting rid of email is good for everyone – and if users want to keep things, there are folders within the archive they can classify those emails to. Hopefully, all these systems will be able to do this automatically someday, but until that distant-future becomes reality, it’s good to give users some skin in the game (”classify this or you will lose it.”)
And, if you are worried that users will cringe at the thought of Big Brother monitoring their information usage, just remember that the information they create and use while in the employ of the organization is not theirs – the organization bears the liability (at least in the US). And we know from cases like Chevron (where male employees sent around emails about why beer is better than women) that employees are not always going to adhere to usage policies – better to be safe than sorry. Better to monitor and proactively enforce than be caught red-handed after the fact and deal with sanctions and other fall out.
