RSD

RSD Expands Global Footprint

We are thrilled to announce a formal strategic distribution partnership for the Middle
East region with BSEEN International Organization Ltd. BSEEN International is a global consulting and services company that is uniquely positioned to deliver Strategic Business Development and Sales and Marketing Services to a selected group of Information Technology and Communications enterprises that seek growth, in particular outside their home base into key world markets.

The challenge of information governance is a global one. Companies have massive amounts of content measured in terabytes or even petabytes – which is often times scattered across repositories located in different jurisdictions and multiple architectures. Under the terms of this exciting partnership agreement, BSEEN has become a distributor for RSD in the Middle East region leveraging their local operations in Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE to bolster the penetration of RSD in the region.

Read the complete press release here.

Summary of LegalTech 2010 – Are You Ready for Litigation?

As I walked into the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, I knew this conference was going to be good. The liveliness was present a few blocks away as some protesters were objecting the “pay by gigabyte” model for eDiscovery services.  After spending $4 to check my coat (thanks Hilton!), I walked into the expo hall and began my journey into LegalTech 2010.

First and foremost, I was amazed how many vendors offered eDiscovery solutions. Thanks to FRCP Rule 26(a), all electronic stored information (ESI) is admissible in courts. Many vendors have jumped on the bandwagon with the promise of helping litigation teams find the smoking gun. Most of the vendors I talked to at the conference blurred the lines between software and services. At one point, I was looking for the exhibitor who had the sign “me too”. This is clearly a market primed for consolidation (mergers, acquisitions, fall out).

I was able to learn about new technologies such as Nexidia who have this unique indexing facility to search audio files (without transcription). Redact-It from Informative Graphics has a comprehensive redaction facility to address data privacy requirements (for example, hide social security numbers from documents). There were only a couple of vendors who touted information governance – which was not a surprise.

Most of the vendors on the market look at eDiscovery as a reactive processes – sending in a SWAT team in the middle of the night to search servers. The high costs of litigation are now forcing companies to bring eDiscovery tools and the process in-house. However, companies need to look at the bigger picture.

Organizations need to be proactive and prepared for litigation – otherwise stiff penalties will ensue along with uncontrolled costs. Historically, records management and legal discovery were managed as two distinct domains. Moving forward, these two disciplines are coming together since they are both fighting to solve the same issue – the explosion of ESI and being prepared for litigation. 

It’s pretty simple – saving everything forever is not a sustainable solution. Corporations require a mechanism to policy-manage information and to align it to the correct levels of accessibility, protection, and retention.  This includes structured and unstructured content stored in disparate silos (i.e. ECM repositories, SharePoint, data warehouses, databases). Companies need to look for proven solutions to proactively manage information lifecycle while providing secure access to support eDiscovery.

Here’s the problem.  Being proactive costs money – and it costs money today! This is a time when budgets have been trimmed, resources are constrained, projects are being managed under a microscope, and priorities are constantly being scrutinized. I have heard people compare information governance to a number of things:

Dental hygiene – Jake Frazier, a Compliance and eDiscovery Attorney for EMC, used the analogy that if eDiscovery is the root canal, information governance is the brushing and flossing. If a corporation performs diligent maintenance of its information, there is much less content that has to be processed through eDiscovery.

Insurance policy – You pay your insurance premiums just in case something happens. You can’t decide to buy auto insurance after you get into a car accident. The same holds true with information governance and eDiscovery. Implementing an information governance program after you have a multimillion dollar lawsuit detailed in the Wall Street Journal will only help your next potential litigation.

These are great analogies. I personally like to compare the cost of information governance and eDiscovery to credit cards. If you pay now to have an information governance program, you will be better prepared and will pay less when eDiscovery happens. If you don’t have information governance, when a lawsuit occurs you will pay more for eDiscovery.

So, pay now or pay later. Regardless, you will pay.

Review of Lotusphere 2010

Last week, I was very fortunate to attend Lotusphere in Orlando – and it was not just because of the weather.  For starters, this was my first official Lotus event and I was looking forward to being part of a recognized high-quality event.  It also presented me with a golden opportunity to learn about innovative solutions, network with fellow peers, and discover new trends.  So for what it’s worth, here is my review.

E-mail archiving is everywhere

There were at least ten different vendors at the event offering e-mail archiving.  I am not surprised since e-mail has captured the attention of the media, executive management, U.S government, industry analysts, and IT surveys.  I managed to speak to most of these vendors and tried to identify the differences between the various offerings.  It all came down to user interface, references and scalability.  IONET Software (all the way from New Zealand who flew 27 hours for the event) had a neat simple user interface, Extracomm from the Toronto area seemed to have a solid reference base, and Symantec claimed scalability (measured in number of mailboxes).      

The perfect storm – it’s not just about e-mail

One of the reasons executive management takes e-mail archiving to heart is the challenge of eDiscovery.  As I indicated last month, when it comes to eDiscovery readiness there is much more than e-mail.  It’s about anything stored electronically – statements, transaction reports, documents, letters, databases, audio/video files, images, etc.  It is not me saying this…read Rule 26(a) to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP).

Most of the vendors at Lotusphere who touted eDiscovery used it only in the context of e-mail.  A couple of vendors went beyond e-mail including EMC (thanks to their acquisition of Kazeon).  This will change at next year’s Lotusphere.

Quickr is taking off

We all like (or pretend to like) collaboration – wikis, blogs, social media, file sharing, documents, etc.  Lotus Quickr seems to be a pretty good team collaboration suite for helping users share content.  On the surface, it looks very competitive to Microsoft’s SharePoint.  In 2010, it will be interesting to see if Quickr takes market share away from SharePoint and if companies will really migrate their documents to the Quickr platform.

Just like with any collaboration suite, companies will need to address the challenges around lifecycle management, scalability, and integrating with other corporate content buried in enterprise content management (ECM), records management (RM) and information archiving suites.  Alfresco made an announcement at the event to address some of these challenges and Infosys seemed to have an innovative solution to bridge the gap between Quickr and ECM systems.  For a nominal fee, IBM should be able to address some of these challenges as well.

I will make sure my next year’s budget includes a trip to Lotusphere.  In the meantime, please let me know what you thought of Lotusphere 2010.

GED, CMS, ECM, EIM,... et alors !

"2010 sera l'année de l'Enterprise Information Management" annonce Debra Logan (analyste du Gartner) sur son blog.

« Les entreprises les plus performantes montrent le chemin en commençant à adopter une perspective radicalement nouvelle en ce qui concerne la valeur de l'information, dans un monde ouvert où les modes de travail coopératifs et collaboratifs associent l'ensemble des acteurs au sein d'une entreprise mais aussi d'une chaîne de valeur » explique Patrick Ferraris dans une étude présentée par le CIGREF.

Le ton est donné ! Mais qu'en est-il des projets et des réalités ?

Nous avons lu beaucoup d'analyses et certains acronymes ont fini par devenir familier : GED, CMS ou ECM, et pour 2010 l'EIM, en plus des traditionnels vœux et des inévitables résolutions.

L'Entreprise Information Management est une stratégie qui consiste principalement à valoriser son patrimoine documentaire.
Cette valorisation doit se faire au bénéfice des trois principaux objectifs de l'entreprise : le développement des affaires, la maîtrise des coûts et l'exigence de conformité.

L'archivage, le record management ou encore l'eDiscovery ne peuvent pas être une fin en soi.
Ils répondent à des besoins dont l'ultime finalité est de servir les objectifs de l'entreprise.

En matière d'actif informationnel de l'entreprise, le principal capital réside dans les méta données.
Les méta données sont clefs

• pour les affaires dans la mesure ou elles condensent l'essentiel du contenu d'un document, 
• pour la conformité car elles disposent de toutes les informations nécessaires au regard des dispositions légales ainsi que de la gestion des accès.
• pour la maîtrise des coûts car elles permettent de gérer notamment le cycle de vie ainsi que les supports 

Ainsi, la stratégie d'EIM va, à l'initiative et avec l'appui des sphères dirigeantes de l'entreprise, s'attacher à préciser la nature et le contenu de l'actif informationnel, avant de mettre en place les solutions techniques de mise en œuvre : définition, automatisation, propagation et contrôle.

Alors, quoi de neuf avec EIM ?
Rien, dirons certains,
oui mais en apparence seulement car quelque soit l'appellation ou l'acronyme, nul peut douter que la maturité des technologies d'archivage, de gestion de contenu ou encore de records management nous permettent de passer à l'étape suivante.

Cette étape que certains appellent de leurs vœux pour les prochains mois nécessitent de nouveaux outils dédiés et conçus au regard de ce qui est un réel challenge pour les organisations.

Volume to the Sixth Power

Scalability.  Now that’s perhaps one of my all time favorite marketing terms.  All software vendors offer a flexible solution that is open and scalable, right?  According to Wikipedia, scalability is a system which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be readily enlarged. 

When it comes to information governance, exactly how do you define and measure scalability?  Most people in the enterprise content management (ECM) and information management market will tell you it’s the amount of stored data (i.e. number of documents stored or actually storage size).  While this is certainly one valid metric, there is more.  Much more.  It’s something I often refer to as volume⁶.

Volume¹ – Content

So, let’s get the obvious one out of the way.  On a daily basis, companies have employees producing gigabytes and applications generating terabytes of information.  This ends up being stored somewhere –typically in one or more repository.  An easy indicator of measuring scalability is the vendor track record for supporting or managing petabytes or even exabytes of information. 

Volume² – Format Types

There are practically thousands of different types of information within the enterprise – print streams, images, ERP/CRM reports, Office documents, databases, e-mail, Website content, instant messages and rich media such as audio and video files.  Each content type has different formats – each with its own unique needs.  Some repositories are better than others at handing certain formats which is precisely one of the reasons companies have multiple repositories.  Information governance must take into account the variety of formats and repositories in the organization.  More on this next month…

Volume³ – Jurisdictions, Regulations, and Laws

I attended a recent Webcast from D4 Discovery that indicated there are over 14,000 information retention laws.  Exactly how does a global organization follow and manage these regulations?  How about enforcement of these laws?  There are clear indications the number of laws will increase in the next few years.    

Volume⁴ – Platforms and Storage Devices

Life will be beautiful (and way too boring) if there was one platform, operating system and storage technology in the enterprise.  Platforms and operating systems range from Windows, Mac, UNIX, to the mainframe.  Then you have storage solutions and hierarchical storage management (HSM) products such as WORM, IBM TSM, Veritas NBU, EMC Centera, and HP Omniback.  An IT leader from a fortune 100 company once told me, “We have one of each”.   Makes sense.  Your information governance framework must take all of these environments into consideration.

Volume⁵ – Applications

Applications run your business – billing, customer service, accounting/finance, human resources, supply chain management, procurement, IT service management, etc, etc, etc.  Oh yeah, don’t forget your LOB (line of business) applications.  These systems generate and consume an infinite amount of information.  How easy and fast can your ECM system capture content from these isolated systems?  How about providing these various applications secure and fast access to this content?

Volume⁶ – Users

What if (and yes, a big what if) you only have one person accessing your ECM system that’s managing petabytes of information?  Is this still considered scalable?  Some people will claim yes.  However, this is not true.  It’s also about the amount of access and concurrent requests made to the system. 

So, the next time you talk with your information governance vendor – ask them how they define scalability.  I define it as volume to the sixth power: (content)  plus  (formats)  plus (jurisdictions) plus (platforms/storage)  plus (applications)  plus (users).

Now that’s scalability.

2010: The Year of Information Governance

In 2008, RSD began a two-year journey to fulfill our vision that information governance will become a major issue within almost every company in the world during this decade.

 

A 35-year-old company, RSD has a large base of experience addressing some of the core problems which fit under the information governance umbrella: management of reports and business information output from very large applications (both mainframe and UNIX); archiving of business records over lifecycles that can extend into many decades; cost control for companies wishing to move “inactive” content from their expensive, tier-one storage systems, but requiring reliable retrieval and restoration of data from storage at lower tiers in the hierarchy.

 

But we believe that the problem is becoming even more acute – particularly in the wake of the economic challenges which we have all experienced over the past 18 months – and that its scope is expanding.  Company boards of directors are now forcinge C-level executives to develop enterprise-wide information governance strategies.  They will do so in the first instance because the penalties associated with failing to comply with rapidly expanding laws and regulations put even large global businesses at risk.

 

On this blog, I will occasionally share my “view from Geneva” on industry issues relating to information governance.

 

Today, I want to applaud Debra Logan at Gartner for her recent post, New Year’s Resolutions: Information Governance.  In her post, Debra addresses why information governance will be a key issue this year.  She identifies key questions that every CIO, chief risk or compliance officer, perhaps even every CEO – needs to answer:

 

“How much data does the company have?  Where is that data?  How much is it costing us to store it?  Can we find what we need when we need it? Of what business value is the data that we are keeping? How often is it accessed?  What are our legal and compliance obligations?  Are we using it to its best advantage or are we keeping it because its simply too much trouble to sort the useful from the useless and bin what we can’t use? “

 

This is a great starting point for any executive seeking to get their arms around the information governance challenge.

 

And stay tuned to this blog for our views on how to answer these key questions.  We believe we have pretty well thought-out answers.

RSD annonce l’ouverture d’une filiale à Madrid

"En cette période, nous souhaitons manifester notre volonté d’aller de l’avant sur le marché ibérique en nous engageant encore plus auprès de nos clients espagnols et en leur apportant notre qualité de services ainsi que des solutions qui vont les aider à répondre aux nombreux défis, notamment de gestion de l’information, qui se présentent à eux" annonce Pierre Van Beneden, Directeur Général de RSD

Lire le communiqué

Information Management: Ten Things You Should NOT Do In 2010

Happy New Year.  So, we are almost into our second week of 2010 and I am enjoying all the 2010 predictions, resolutions, recommendations, and the ultimate “to do” lists.  In 2010, I am looking forward to continuing my conversations with current and future customers as well as industry pundits regarding the challenge of managing the explosion of information – in formats and volume. 

So instead of another list of predictions or telling you what to do this year, here is what you should not to do in 2010: 

Do not ignore the risk – Controlling risk is fundamental to conducting business and managing information.  Every e-mail we write, document we create, correspondence we send, and voice mail we leave can eventually become a record in a legal case and (ultimately) cost the company a substantial amount of money.  It’s simply impossible to ignore this risk – regardless of organization size, industry, or geographic location.  Measure it, don’t ignore it.    

Do not discount the information governance hype – Sure this is easy for me to say because I am playing my part in creating this hype – but the excitement around information governance is becoming a reality.  Information governance provides a comprehensive framework to manage risk (and pain) related to compliance with laws and regulations regarding the creation, retention and disposition of business records.  As you are reading this, companies are forming committees, budgets, and detailed road maps around information governance.  

Do not complicate retention policies – Keeping everything forever doesn’t seem to work and deleting everything is certainly not an option, so the sensible solution is to define retention policies and hope they get enforced across all applications.   It scares me when I hear a company has thousands of distinct retention policies.  Control the amount of “retention buckets” you have and focus your efforts on ensuring they are centrally managed and enforced. 

Do not rely on search alone – I cringe when I hear people consider search engines as a solution to solve their information management challenges.  Search is certainly one piece of the puzzle, but it’s only a portion of the solution.  What about policy enforcement, Web presentment, data privacy, workflow, collaboration, legal hold, lifecycle management, etc, etc, etc. 

Do not copy the competition – It’s a small world.  Chances are you know someone (who knows someone) among your top competitors.   We all follow each other, hear (and sometimes spread) rumors about each other, and simply go along with what the competitor does.  Although this strategy may work in certain cases, this will not work when undertaking information governance.  The high level goals are the same but each company is unique with different short- and long-term objectives. 

Do not bypass management – I hate to be the messenger, but information governance requires complete support from executive management since it spans across all facets of the organization and the entire IT infrastructure.  In fact, most information governance projects are initiated using the “top down” approach. 

Do not be a sole hero – We all want to be heroes but I guarantee it won’t work in this case.  In fact, the only way to be successful is to build a solid partnership between the business, technical and legal functions.  So, bring lots of donuts to meetings and listen to each other.  The decisions you make as a team regarding business processes, retention policies, security rules, data standards, and regulations will be critical.    

Do not forget about the operational content – In the last couple of years, companies primarily focused on unstructured documents (i.e. MSFT Office) and e-mail.  However, this is only a portion of the information in the enterprise.  What about the ERP/CRM reports, transaction statements, and images?

Do not neglect end-users requirements – Often times, end-users are ignored or pushed to the side.  In 2010, do not neglect requirements from business units and end-users.  They will appreciate being included and so will management. 

Do not buy without trying it first – Before you sign the purchase order, deploy a proof of concept.  I personally like to see things working before making a commitment.  While the solution may sound wonderful on paper (trust me, it always does) – the proof is in the pudding.

L’information : prochain défi pour les entreprises

Tel est le sous-titre de l'article présentant les résultats de l’étude CIGREF-Capgemini Consulting qui s’appuie d’une part sur les travaux du professeur Donald Marchand, de l’IMD à Lausanne, l’une des premières institutions universitaires en Europe, et d’autre part sur les interviews de 490 DSI à travers le monde, démontre le lien existant entre la maturité de la fonction SI, l’usage efficace que font les entreprises de l’information et leur performance (part de marché, rentabilité, innovation, réputation).

Sans dévoiler le contenu de cette étude [disponible en téléchargement], il nous a paru pertinent de partager avec vous le constat suivant : Il devient indispensable pour les entreprises de dépasser le cadre traditionnel du management des SI pour prendre en compte l'ensemble des facteurs liés à l'utilisation efficace de l'information.

Selon les rédacteurs, les formes actuelles de gouvernance des SI doivent évoluer pour prendre en compte de façon explicite l'usage de l'information et les DSI doivent devenir les ambassadeurs de cette réforme.

 Patrick Ferraris - Capgemini Consulting - explique que : « Les entreprises les plus performantes montrent le chemin en commençant à adopter une perspective radicalement nouvelle en ce qui concerne la valeur de l'information, dans un monde ouvert où les modes de travail coopératifs et collaboratifs associent l'ensemble des acteurs au sein d'une entreprise mais aussi d'une chaîne de valeur ».

Ainsi, au moment où beaucoup d'entreprises développent et renforcent leur modèle d'affaires, elles doivent également dynamiser leur capital en terme d'INFORMATION en s'appuyant sur leur fonction SI. Un usage effectif et pertinent de l'information serait donc bien le prochain défi des entreprises.

Tout le monde s'accorde à considérer l'information comme un actif important de l'entreprise et que la gouvernance de l'information est à considérer d'urgence.

Cette étude met en exergue l'intuition de chacun, à savoir qu'une bonne maitrise (gestion, confiance, etc.) de l'information est un facteur de croissance et de développement des entreprises.

Par contre, il est peut-être nouveau de lire que le SI doit être au cœur d'une initiative de gouvernance de l'information et qu'au delà des questions techniques, il peut devenir le véritable chef d'orchestre d'une politique de valorisation et d'optimisation de l'exploitation du capital informationnel de l'entreprise. 

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La synthése de l'étude sur le site du CIGREF.

The Record of the Year Goes to…

While driving to work today, I was enjoying the light traffic patterns and listening to a popular New York radio station listing the top ten records of 2009.  I thought this was ironic since most people today do not purchase records.  As the two disc jockeys were arguing over which record was better, I couldn’t help myself thinking about records in the corporate world.    

No Line on the Horizon…

Before you continue, please note I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV.  I have been in the information management and regulatory affairs industry for 13+ years and had countless conversations with companies regarding the exact definition of a record.  This term is often misused, misinterpreted, or sometimes over-hyped.  In simple terms, a record is evidence of an event related to an organization or business transaction: financial statement, accounting report, employee appraisal, copy of a signed mortgage application, medical x-ray, e-mail, Microsoft Office document, transaction history stored in the database, blogs, instant messages, and even audio and video files.

Unsurprisingly, it’s estimated that more than 90% of the records being created today are electronic – and the amount and formats of information being generated keeps growing.  The management of electronic records is an important and legitimate business issue.  How that information is controlled presents severe legal, technical, and business implications.  I recently heard a legal team say if the item is accessible, it’s admissible.  So, exactly how does the compliance officer of an organization ensure the proper maintenance of corporate records from the time they are created to their disposal in a cost-effective manner?  At the end of the day, it’s about controlling risk and balancing cost.

21^st Century Breakdown…

Over the last decade, companies spent an absurd amount of money deploying islands of records management solutions for their Electronic Content Management (ECM) repositories, data warehouses, file shares, physical paper records, and e-mail applications.  It turns out these remedies complicated matters even more and acted purely as band-aids to the underlying issue – the challenge of centrally controlling the creation, retention, access, and destruction of information as well as easily adopting to new rules and regulations.  These systems also resulted in redundant technologies with limited scalability and isolated functionality.

The E.N.D. (Energy Never Dies)…

As we move into 2010, the attitude and methodology to support the growing amount of information and manage the associated risk will change.  Most of the surveys in 2009 proved companies are already hard at work evaluating their information management strategies, global retention policies, and ability to meet ongoing eDiscovery obligations.  Information governance is a platform that enables the enforcement of corporate-based retention policies and processes across the entire IT infrastructure.  The framework provides authorized users simple access to content scattered across the organization – regardless of repository, platform, or format.  Now that’s what I call “Boom Boom Pow”.

It’s 10pm, Do You Know Where your e-mail is?

The Bush White House e-mail controversy which surfaced in 2007 has been stealing the news these past few days.  In case you didn’t hear, the Executive Office of the President agreed to restore 94 days of missing e-mails from 2003-2005.  The previous administration failed to recover over 20 million missing e-mails which will now be transferred to the National Archives for preservation and eventual release.

Regardless of your political views, I think this recent change of events is newsworthy, timely, and all too familiar.  It seems every time we turn the page in the Wall Street Journal, we hear about vicious lawsuits with astonishing facts and supporting documentation.   Most of the evidence focuses around e-mail and associated attachments – and no wonder – according to a recent survey from IDG Research, 62% percent of executives rate eDiscovery a top driver for email management strategies.

However, there is a lot more to litigation readiness than emails and attachments – but that’s a different story for a different day.

So when I hear the White House knowingly continued to use a broken system for preserving electronic records, I often wonder how many companies out there are in the same boat.  Companies who know they have a problem but are either ignoring it, wishing it will all go away, or struggling to deploy the proper controls and archiving services.  It’s not an easy problem to fix but certainly one that needs to be acknowledged and addressed.  If you type “Email archiving” into Google, you will get over 2 million hits with vendor promises to solve your e-mail management issues.  So how come it’s not universally resolved?

The fact is – it’s not that simple to fix.  In addition to having a robust effective archiving platform, companies need to manage the policies and ensure they are properly enforced.  The retention policies must be clearly defined (and agreed upon by management with approval from legal), communicated to everyone in the organization, and then accurately enforced across all e-mail servers and applications.  And then how do you handle the proliferation of Blackberries, iPhones, Instant Messaging applications, personal email accounts, and those handy SMS messages?

This is where Information Governance comes in.  Information Governance is a solution framework to manage risk (and pain) related to compliance with laws and regulations regarding the retention and disposition of business records.  The framework enables proactive and central information management with a systematic process across business functions and isolated silos of information.  This is precisely the reason Information Governance is becoming a top priority for all C-level corporate executives and including now the President of the United States.