Any executive who’s ever been involved in litigation — or at least watches Law and Order on a regular basis — knows that the process of discovery calls for all information related to that litigation to be disclosed. No matter how big the company, that’s a tall order, given the number of ways such information can be created using the plethora of high-tech tools, from BlackBerry handhelds to voice mail, available to workers.
Say hello, then, to information governance. “It’s a unified view of your information and what you need to do with that information for compliance purposes, legal-hold purposes, and also overall for deletion purposes,” explained Nicole Eagan, chief marketing officer for Autonomy. Her company creates server-based software that helps companies identify and hold information. The company’s newest product, Autonomy Information Governance, takes the task of identifying data that could be relevant to litigation or compliance efforts to a new level by making “human-friendly” information understandable to computers.
Human-Friendly, Computer-Hostile
Eagan defined human-friendly data as “the type of information that people create and consume.” It can be contained in the e-mails or instant messages we send, conference calls we participate in, and the PowerPoint presentations we read. Computers have a hard time understanding that information, she told us, compared to structured data that “can be put in rows and columns [that] the computer can process and understand.” Most organizations have massive amounts of this unstructured data, since every employee has the tools to create it.
So when a company wants to ensure it’s in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley or other regulations, or is facing litigation, it’s important that there be a way to locate and hold information in a way that is legally sound. That, Eagan said, is what Autonomy Information Governance does. “This system will automate that [process] for them…