SNW Fall 2007 Presentation
From Wikibon
Contents |
Unstructured Content Management (Title Slide)
Moving from Server Room to Court Room to Board Room
Presented by Wikibon Members:
David Vellante Co-founder, The Wikibon Project
Michael McCreary Senior Director, Legal Business Technology, Pfizer , Inc.
1:00–1:45 p.m. October 15th Information Management Track Gaylord Texan Resort Hotel and Convention Center in Dallas, Texas
Description: One of the biggest challenges facing storage executives today is the out of control growth of unstructured data. Get it wrong and your CEO could land in jail or your company could lose billions from lawsuits. While everyone is rightly framing this issue in terms of Sarbanes-Oxley and litigation risks, little attention is given to the fact that it will be virtually impossible for organizations to truly gain control of unstructured data without the ability to auto-classify data at the point of creation or use. Unfortunately the technologies and processes available to auto-classify content are immature and often unreliable or inadequate, meaning companies remain exposed.
As a result of participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Develop an understanding of the new organizational tensions storage administrators will encounter
- Gain tools to communicate the problem to executive management
- Identify how to address key areas of exposure immediately
Key discussion points - Slide 1:
- Multiple choice question - What's worse?
- A) Landing your CEO in Jail?
- B) Getting hit with a $1B law suit?
- C) Being responsible for your company going out of business?
- D) All your users want to kill you?
- Why we're qualified to make this presentation to you:
- IT analyst
- IT practitioner
Agenda (slide 2)
- Is information an asset or liability?
- The required business capability
- Why auto-classification is so crucial
- The stages of archiving and retention systems
- IT actions for storage administration
- Q/A
Information: Asset or Liability? (Slide 3)
Is information an asset or a liability? Of course the answer is both. Why? The chart shows to vectors: 1) Stored structured data (e.g. ERP, CRM, Financials, etc) growing at 10% per annum; and 2) Unstructured content (e.g. emails, chat, voice, documents, etc) growing at 50% per annum. (Insert some fun facts RE: unstructured data growth).
Because they contain highly structured data and metadata, applications such as ERP, financials, CRM, supply chain, etc., can be credibly used to indisputably re-create a sequence of events such as who placed the order, for what, for how much, when, and on what terms. In contrast, unstructured information such as e-mails, documents, spreadsheets, voicemail, and pictures are masses of stored information where it's much more difficult to determine what's relevant and replicate a decision flow in a manner that is provable with a reasonable degree of certainty. This represents a huge liability for organizations as information uncertainty grows daily and exponentially.
So organizations are rightly focused on mitigating information liabilities.
Hightened by regulations like:
- SEC rule 17A (late 90's) - must be able to recreate and produce any type of document (including voice) within 48 hours-- keep everything on line, never delete (crazy, spend tons on storage);
- Gramm-Leach-Bliley (late 90's)
- Patriot Act
- SOX (2003?)
- HIPPA
- Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (2006)
However as organizations work feverishly to protect themselves they naturally create constraints on the use, reuse, distribution, etc. of information and negatively impact data value and flexibility of the business.
NOTE: It may be useful to add another slide showing the different industries. Case studies show the organizational dynamics vary dramatically by segment (e.g. financial services versus mfg).
Slide 3A
An industry spectrum:
Y-Axis is bit vs. atom (negroponte) X-Axis is risk
Upper right quadrant is Financial Lower left is Education
The Business Capability (Slides 4-6)
Slide 4: A vision slide showing the evolution of unstrcutured data management.
- Define types of information
- Lay out a vision of how unstructured content will be managed in the future
- Will structured and unstructured remain separate (block vs file?)-- can they come together?
- What will the business capability look like in 3-5 years
- Draw a picture of this for the audience
- Why auto-classification is so crucial
Stages of Managing Unstructured Content (Slides 7-8)
My thinking here is to turn this into a specrtum slide and dramatically abbreviate the text points
Slide 8 is specific steps to get from stage to stage to ultimately realize the vision over an N year period.
IT Actions for Storage Administration (slides 9 and 10)
These need to be fleshed out but I think we can view these in terms of the following framework:
- IT in general and storage administration specifically: Sell the project based on risk and deliver on risk mitigation narrowly. Eliminate outliers to avoid scope creep but architect the system from a storage standpoint with the ability to add value over time. I'm thinking about actions related to a simplified 4 stage process (from slide 7): 1) put in the email archive; 2) educate/train on proper behavior; 3) automate; 4) integrate with other applications
- Organizational: This is the business, legal, records management, compliance, IT alliance. Storage admin should avoid getting sucked into scope creep outside of setting up the archive and an architecture that can evolve to accommodate future needs (is this a reasonable assumption?). Help the storage admin understand where the orders are coming from and how to manage up the chain.
- Technology integration: Every piece of electronic data, structured or unstructured has to go through the storage. This means capabilities and processes to ensure court admissability along with the flexibility to not lock data value up will be the key to this action.
