Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

37,000 Libraries of Congress created in one year

No wonder data management budgets are bursting and the right data is so hard to find

By Sonya Sigler, CataphoraHow much would it cost to house 37,000 Libraries of Congress? That is how much newelectronic data is created in a single year, according to one study. Fortunately, the data isstored in computers not in a monumental building, but the costs of creating, storing andmanaging data nevertheless are significant and growing for all businesses.Smart data retention policies can help decrease the costs of managing all of this data.Knowing exactly what information you have and where it is reaps benefits for anyorganization, allowing this knowledge to be shared efficiently. Good data managementcan help an organization avoid having to wade through any more data than absolutelynecessary in the event of legal action. Finally, well-defined and repeatable processes candecrease the costs of repeatedly reviewing the same data in the event of repeated patternlitigation, and are more readily defensible.

The Costs of Mushrooming Data

Electronic documents are mushrooming with the spread of email and instant messaging(IM) and, of course, the use of electronic documents in general. A University of California Berkeley study estimated that new stored information grew about 30% a year between 1999 and 2002

. The same study concluded that five exabytes of newinformation were created in a single year. Most of us are familiar with megabytes andgigabytes. A reasonable hard drive on a PC may have a capacity in the region of 100gigabytes. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes. Another way of looking at it – fiveexabytes is approximately 37,000 times greater than all of the information in the Libraryof Congress.40% of this information was produced in the United States and 92% of it was stored onmagnetic media, mostly on hard disks.Another study forecasts that 84 billion e-mails – more than 33 billion of which will bespam messages – will be sent daily worldwide in 2006

. Of course, all of this electroniccommunication includes personal as well as business communications, but there can belittle doubt that a significant proportion of these numbers refers to purely businesscommunications.A slew of associated costs are growing right along with the increase in numbers of documents.

How Much Information? University of California School of Information Management and Systems, 2003.http://www.sims.berkeley.edu:8000/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/

Worldwide Email Usage 2005-2009 Forecast: Email's Future Depends on Keeping Its Value High and ItsCost Low, IDC

April 2006 issue of e-Discovery Law & Strategy

The most direct and obvious cost associated with all of this data is, of course, the cost of storing it. Per-gigabyte storage costs have seen dramatic reduction in recent years, butthe cost of the media for storing more and more data, coupled with the cost of physicalspace for the media and the associated management logistics have led to overall increasedcosts of storage. This is further fueled by more stringent legal and regulatoryrequirements governing the retention of business records.Additional costs result when an organization gets involved in legal action, when thelarger volume of potentially relevant electronic evidence clearly has ripple effects. Allother things being equal, more time must be taken by more people to go through the vastvolumes of data involved. Someone has to make sense of the data and actually find whatis actually relevant.The legal risks and implication in fact outrun just the growth in data. Legal costs risk spiraling upward at a rate that is even greater than the actual growth in volume, as moreand more data disproportionately adds to the complexity and risk of the legal response.Thus, there are not only the directly quantifiable costs of legal work, but also the higher risk of failure to defend successfully as a result of the volume and complexity of potentially relevant data.Furthermore, in many cases, pattern litigation results in the same (or nearly the same)data being subject to discovery over and over again. Lack of repeatable analysis and processes can result in significant duplication of effort and related costs.

Crucial Steps

While all of these electronic documents have a negative impact on the corporate bottomline, they can also provide a golden opportunity to proactively use the data to reducecosts and meet strategic goals throughout the organization.A few crucial steps can help an organization to minimize its costs and maximize theadvantages of the data.The very first step is to know what data you have. This consists not only of knowingwhere all copies of backup tapes and so forth are to be found. It also involvesunderstanding just what information is stored on each tape or other medium. For example, if it is known that a tape does not contain data from any relevant custodian, itmay not be necessary to go to the expense of restoring that tape at all. At a moresophisticated level, many documents can only be really understood in the context of other related documents, so any technology that hopes to provide true insight should supportthe concept of context between documents rather than merely within documents. Themore efficient processes and decreased volumes of stored data resulting from this stepoffer an immediate cost benefit.

Once the ability to truly understand the information has been developed, it is a vital cost-saving measure to build a repeatable process. There are two aspects to this. First, theway relevant evidence is produced should be consistent; such consistency is the bedrock of a defensible process. An inconsistent, non-repeatable process is dangerouslysusceptible to attack by the opposing party, which may succeed in making the argumentthat the response has been inadequate. This can lead to further, far-reaching discoverywhich will be costly in simple monetary terms and which exposes the respondent toincreased danger that something damaging may be unearthed. Second, in terms of repeatable processes, in the case of pattern litigation, any relevant information that was previously produced should be readily available for subsequent cases, eliminating theunnecessary cost of repeatedly searching for it.A sound retention policy, coupled with good insight into what data resides where, canallow an organization to delete data that it is not legally required to retain. This reducesthe cost of storage, and can also significantly reduce the cost of legal discovery, sincethere will be less data to review.A further cost management step is to address employees’ use of e-mail and instantmessaging. A 2003 survey showed some troubling statistics on the topic of employee useof email

. In that year, the average employee reportedly spent 25% of the workday on e-mail, with 8% of workers devoting over four hours a day to this activity. Equallydisturbingly, 14% of respondents had been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee e-mail. While e-mail is a legitimate business tool, managing its use(both in terms of time and content) has the potential to increase productivity and todecrease many of the costs associated with large volumes of inadequately controlledcommunications. The first step here is to put in place an effective policy for e-mail andinstant message (IM) use, coupled with policies and processes for systematic anddefensible retention – and deletion – of e-mail messages.

Departmental Responsibilities

Such actions are the basic building blocks for cost reductions and business intelligence benefits across the enterprise. In addition, individual departments can play a role. Theoverarching trend is that no single group is solely responsible for an organization’sinformation assets – every group must play its part. Managerial functions are the ownersof most of the data. Legal folks are most intimately acquainted with laws, regulations,and the implications of poor data management policies. And, finally, the IT organizationis in charge of the nuts and bolts of putting in place and running the systems on which thedata resides and which must support the organization’s business and legal imperatives.

Information Technology

There is increasing need for IT to understand the business and legal implications of corporate information. Some people have characterized this as a change in the role of the

2003 E-Mail Rules, Policies and Practices Survey, American Management Association.http://www.gwtools.com/policy/articles/Email_Policies_Practices.pdf

of 00

Sigler Article 4 06 37000_libraries

246 Reads

Info and Rating

Category:	Magazines/Newspapers
Rating:
Upload Date:	01/31/2009
Copyright:	Attribution Non-commercial
Tags:	magazines ediscovery Litigation sonya sigler cataphora cost control measures magazines ediscovery Litigation sonya sigler cataphora cost control measures (fewer)