Organic eDiscovery

eDiscovery Add comments

I am sure you are thinking, ‘What is this guy talking about? eDiscovery is not milk or fruit…. What is this organic eDiscovery stuff?’

Wherever I go these days, people seem to be talking about eDiscovery. Certainly every email archiving company talks about it. But truly, none of them have a complete solution that can span across all enterprise data — text, images, spreadsheets, documents, audio files, animation, Website and computer programs, across desktops, servers and across network; and I have yet to see a single solution that can handle structured data. Yet this data is very important to enterprise-wide searches; for instance to answer discovery in civil torts. Any eDiscovery solution that cannot examine the data in the organization’s databases leaves you only half-covered, like going to the court without your trousers.

Now you see where I am going with organic eDiscovery. The challenges are daunting. Before you can deploy a search across all enterprise applications, you have to understand all enterprise data. Typically, according to Gartner, Forrester, etc., IT maintains six copies of each production application database to cover testing, training, and development along with, of course, actual production and backup. Obviously search speed can be boosted dramatically by ignoring these copies, particularly since important subsets of the data in most of them should be masked anyhow. So once you understand the duplicate copies, you can optimize the overall search.

Now that we agree that data in enterprise apps need to be searched and that we need to ignore all the duplicate data; the next question is how do you search these very complex databases, with their thousands of tables, multiple versions, patches, and lots of moving parts. First you need to collect each application’s metadata and this requires an enterprise metadata management tool. Most of these solutions, such as Solix Enterprise Data Management Suite(EDMS), include a central repository tool to manage all enterprise metadata and track changes with upgrades and patches. Deploying an enterprise data management solution not only helps in creating a leaner infrastructure, faster applications and in controlling cost of storage, but also becomes the foundation for deploying a true enterprise-wide search/eDiscovery solution.

We just announced our integration with Oracle Universal Online Archive (UOA) to provide document, email, and application data management. This integration lays the foundation to eventually deploy a eDiscovery solution that can span across all enterprise data. With billable rates for junior associates at many law firms now starting above $200 per hour, the cost to review can be enormous. Investing in building the foundation for eDiscovery for review faster and review less prepares the organization for this tight economy.

I hope to see you at our booth, # 2623, Moscone South, at Oracle Open World. Let us explain how Solix EDMS with Oracle UOA can provide the eDiscovery foundation for you.

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