Manual Search...Meet Google

On John Wang's Grokify Blog he states:

Manual ICP is a slow process that increases information risk and can lead to under collection, late collection, and spoliation. On the other hand, automatic collection can enable ECA, fast collection, and Matter-based ICP. There is no question that automated collection holds advantages over manual ICP. Given the risks associated with Manual ICP, the courts and industry thought leaders are correct to ask if manual collections are still relevant and defensible.

Now, there is no doubt that manual collection for eDiscovery is slow and unwieldy. eDiscovery 2.0 concedes the point here, yet they rage on:

While there’s no dispute that the “automated” collection methods available in litigation software referenced above have a number of features that make this approach more efficient, the question is whether a “manual” (i.e., custodian based) collection process is somehow less defensible. If this is truly the case, then many midsized companies without the budget to purchase such e-discovery applications will inherently be found deficient – which is a daunting notion.

There is clearly a fundamental misunderstanding here. Mid-sized companies, with their mid-sized amount of employees will pay mid-sized licensing fees for automated collection, eDiscovery and records management software. The proportion they pay scales linearly (both up and down) with the size of their company.

And the pricing tangent misses the point entirely, which is that a combination of automatic and manual collection will be the most thorough method of eDiscovery. Having the ability to automatically collect documents will be necessary in the near future (if not right now). Without enterprise-wide search and automatic collection, it is like searching the web without Google. Instead, with only manual collection, you would be starting at a website and clicking link to link or typing in random URLs until you find the right site. How thorough is that?

That Sinking Feeling

I posted this on my personal blog today as well, but I figure its actually more applicable here: Its not only municipalities or cities or even the federal government who have zero control over their data. It's the military as well!

Can you imagine not being able to locate OR destroy classified and sensitive documents? Leaving emails and files tucked away in nooks and crannies of an enormous industrial complex spread over the world with a million employees is no way to do business, much less organize a war. Vital pieces of information can get lost or fall into the wrong hands. Legacy data can be kept...forever. E-mail is never captured and left up to end-users to keep as records (as they see fit). Retention policies are not enforced by any tool, but are trusted to end-users.

This system basically lends itself to failure at the hands of each soldier. How can anyone see this as being logical to our national security? Well apparently the Navy does.

This is why we need H.R. 1387 - the Electronic Message Preservation Act - which would force government bodies to take their information governance into the 21st century. It is now up to a vote in the Senate, and I'm telling you to walk...no, run to your senator's office. It's our nation, our information, let's protect it.

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Also check out Stephen A. Arnold's post in his Beyond Search blog which explores a recent TREC study on enterprise-wide search. They key take-away here is that companies (and the government!) cannot solely depend on custodian-based search when litigation or investigation arises.

When investigations in the military can take years, like the heart-breaking case of Pat Tillman which has taken over 2 years, it is vital to be able to keep your electronic ducks in a row. Yet, the government and many corporations do not find a need to do so.

Basically, to do a thorough investigation someone might have to look through an entire corpse of enterprise data (or at least very large and relevant sets). Is that really a surprise?

Welcome to 1TERM

Welcome to 1TERM, my personal Email Archiving, Records Managment and eDiscovery blog. Together we will explore the exponential expansion of data and how best to manage that within an enterprise-size organization. Be sure to check out the other blogs I contribute to, including The Modern Archivist, for more information.