Across the Pond: Painful Regulation Exists as Well

Yesterday, Zurich Insurance was fined roughly $3.5 million dollars because a back-up tape containing unencrypted personal details of 46,000 policy holders went missing in transit. This is what happens when you rely on purely physical back-up to store sensitive data. The worst part is that Zurich did not even know they had lost the back-up tape for over a year! 

You cannot outsource truly sensitive data this way and expect it to be defensible. As EDD Blog Online points out: The UK "...found that the insurer had failed to take reasonable care to ensure it had effective systems and controls to manage the risks relating to the security of customer data resulting from the outsourcing arrangement." And I completely agree. Zurich, specifically their IT, Compliance, and Risk Management policies, should be reviewed to ensure that their data is kept safe. 

There are enough people out their trying to scam their way to stealing our identities (see Nigerian Scam), without insurance and credit card companies literally losing them. Let's try to act a little responsibly without having to have the government mommy us. Companies with sensitive data (which is pretty much every company) need to archive their data in-house. 

I can't believe this actually happened.

Syncing IT with Knowledge Management

I want to simplify the issue today, so let's keep it short:

The creation of knowledge and ideas within an organization has been streamlined in the last few years, especially with the development of traditional social media, email, mobile devices, and even internal social media. These outlets make it easy for employees to publish their ideas, but the challenge to leverage this knowledge is to deliver this information to the correct people.

With a full ZL deployment, large enterprises can allow their employees to have privileged based access to enterprise information, allowing employees to find the information they need to get their work done. And that's it.

Congress to Everyone: More Lawsuits!

Here's a preview of a post I'll be putting up on The Modern Archivist in the next couple of days. Shoot me your thoughts!

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In 2007 and 2008 the Supreme Court made two rulings the plaintiff's bar could not stomach, Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly.  Lisa Rickard from Townhall.com interprets the two cases stating the Supreme Court aimed to establish that "plaintiffs should not sue someone and subject a defendant to the costs and burdens of litigation if there is no plausible basis for their claims." Seems pretty reasonable.

But last November, Representative Jerrold Nadler from New York, introduced H.R. 4115: Open Access to Courts Act of 2009. The law:

Prohibits a U.S. district court from dismissing a complaint: (1) unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of the claim which would entitle the plaintiff to relief; or (2) on the basis of a determination by the judge that the factual contents of the complaint do not show the plaintiff's claim to be plausible or are insufficient to warrant a reasonable interference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.

In effect, Mr. Nadler aims to open the floodgates of litigation by imposing the burden on the defendant to prove "...beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of the claim..." In an era of ever increasing litigation, with docket's backed up for years, frivolous lawsuits around every corner, and with people even suing themselves...it may be wise to continue to use a judge's discretion when there exists no plausible basis in a case.

Should the law pass, there would be no barrier to entry for potential litigation. The average person could play the Lawsuit Lottery: posting frivolous lawsuits until a corporation settles under the weight of potential discovery. Perhaps, if plaintiffs were penalized with the cost of litigation in the event they lose, the liability would give them adequate exposure to litigation risk and mitigate frivolous lawsuits. But the way the system is right now, H.R. 4115 will only exacerbate an already cramped situation.

Privileges: Not Just for CEOs

Once an Enterprise Content Management system is implemented, it is important to be able to restrict or grant privileges based on an employee’s role in the company. Like we discussed previously, it is important to share and leverage knowledge with a company, but it is also vital to keep sensitive information from leaking.


Imagine you are an investment bank. Now think about a first-year desk jockey you just hired. As a firm, you want him to learn as much as possible, but when he performs an enterprise-wide search, should Lloyd Blankfein's emails show up? Probably not. And the opposite is true as well; it is important for managers, lawyers, C-levels, and compliance officers to be able to access data across the enterprise. 


In this case, low-level or divisional employees need to be restricted in both horizontal and vertical access to data. Without a system to enforce privilege levels on a granular level, an ECM solution will be inherently useless. If there is a checkbox item to include whenever evaluating an ECM solution, this would be a vital one to include.


I'm not sure about everyone else, but ZL's Unified Archive allows you to use your Active Directory from Exchange, the store of information defining the organization virtually, to assign roles and privileges across the enterprise. ZL ensures that you control who can have access to the right data.  

KM Value

Yesterday I introduced Knowledge Management (KM) as a value-addition to a company and the necessary Enterprise Content Management (ECM) which would be the back bone of such a system. Before I get into the weeds, I wanted to step back and clarify why companies find value in KM.

As the United States has progressed, our economy has began to rely more on intellectual capital than manufacturing. Simply, our nation's competitive advantage lies in the minds of our people rather than the manual labor they might perform. In parallel, a company's market value has become increasingly dependent upon the value of its intellectual capital or intangible assets. Intellectual property, patents, certifications, and training have become cornerstones of the modern company because a company's competitive advantage relies on the ability to create and leverage this knowledge. This forms the foundation of modern knowledge management philosophy.This reasoning touches every part of the corporation from human capital management to IT.

 One overwhelming example of the KM impact lies in organizational design. To fully leverage knowledge, a corporation much establish the appropriate KM functions, units and responsibilities within an organization. They must also align the reporting structure to acknowledge key tacit knowledge flows, build cross-functional/office teams, and develop support networks/communities to spawn and catch knowledge. I will be posting more on how companies can take each of these steps in subsequent posts.

The most relevant idea comes alive when you think about a simple case: a key employee departure. In addition to losing the services of this employee, the company also loses:

1. All tacit knowledge the employee has gained
2. All networks the employee has built
3. All explicit knowledge the employee kept personally

The idea of a true knowledge management system would be to introduce systems of redundancy which allow the company to minimize the risk of knowledge loss (in this case) AND to maximize the opportunity of knowledge creation (in other cases). 

The backbone of this ability for a company is a true enterprise content management system which will ensure that (at the very least) all explicit knowledge be kept in house where other can access the data. Such an application could also facilitate knowledge creation by, for instance, allowing employees to find experts within a company by performing enterprise-level searches. (There are some mitigating factors, such as employee privileges, which I will explore in a later post)

I'll continue to visit Knowledge Management throughout this week. If you have any specific questions, don't hesitate to let me know.

You Don't Know Jack: The Titanic, Deck Chairs, and Knowledge Management

According to Wikipedia the definition of knowledge management (KM) is as follows:

[KM] comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice.

The foundation for KM has been laid in the early 1990s as the market has seen more value in what an organization knows, than what they create. KM has thus been garnering more and more attention from management academics and corporations ever since.
There are generally two types of knowledge within an organization: tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the type of knowledge which is hard to pass one, the internal store of information which make it nearly impossible to become a great master of an art without studying beneath one for years. Explicit knowledge pertains to all of the information which can be written down and expressed easily through communication, i.e. the location of Arizona.


In a similar vein, it is important not only to capture information, but to know the location of your knowledge. In large organizations (or even smaller ones) there can be many cracks through which vital information seeps, such as a departing employee or infrastructure failures. What companies should look for is a solution which enables employees to find what they are looking for so that they can do their jobs.


To enable this to happen, there must be a function of enterprise-wide search throughout the company, since relevant documents can be anywhere in a growing era of mobility (think about your iPad, iTouch, blackberry, laptop, home computer, file servers and work desktop). Without the ability to search through anywhere they store data, the ability for employees to access the store of knowledge which the company has built will be limited. And what's the point of knowing something if you can't use it?


Many of the best companies know this, and as Wikipedia says:

Organizations and business decision makers spend a great deal of resources and make significant investments in the latest technology, systems and infrastructure to support knowledge management. It is imperative that these investments are validated properly, made wisely and that the most appropriate technologies and software tools are selected or combined to facilitate knowledge management.

The challenge in enterprise-wide search is the ability to return results in time. Many solutions take weeks or time-out when searching, especially through email (because of the mailbox oriented design of many companies). ZL Unified Archive's competitive advantage is its search speed, in once instance it has searched through over 3 billion documents in a global deployment in a little over 1 minute and continues to do so to this day. In choosing a solution, and making sure it is "validated properly" I'd challenge someone to do it faster, more precisely and on such a scale.


The other challenge of KM, is the ability to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Personally, I follow the iceberg model. Most of a corporation's knowledge lays underwater as tacit knowledge. However, large corporations need to make this as explicit as possible, and an effective enterprise content management system is the first step in doing this. Without the ability to capture what you know, you will never learn. If you stop learning, you're dead in the water. And you don't want to be rearranging chairs on your corporate Titanic in these waters.

Death to Management!

Just wanted to quickly pop in and share this with you all:


According to the WSJ, it is the End of Management as we know it. However, common management knowledge already acknowledges that there's a role inside large corporations for what they are talking about i.e. 'acting like a venture capitalist'. Yet, this is not going to work everywhere. WSJ extrapolating to make sensational headlines. In reality this just reflects shifting ways to manage people, which is, dare I say, still management.


I'll be writing a follow-up on knowledge management as it relates to content management in a little bit. Very interesting stuff! Have a great weekend.