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The eDiscovery Paradigm Shift

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010

eDiscovery Software Pays for Itself in a Matter of Months

According to a Gartner report from December of 2009, eDiscovery software purchased by the Enterprise can pay for itself with one big case or at least within the first year. This type of ROI is almost unprecedented within the Enterprise for business software and literally provides a “no brainer” for justifying the capital outlay and associated expenses.

According to the Gartner report, eDiscovery is a maturing market with entrants from multiple categories, including storage and archiving, search and information access, content and records management, and workflow, as well as tools designed as end-user applications for legal professionals and forensic data collection tools aimed at security professionals, regulators and law enforcement agencies. All of these categories of software vendors have added e-discovery to existing suites or purport to cover various aspects of the eDiscovery process. There are also pure-play e-discovery vendors to consider.

Enterprises purchasing eDiscovery software can reduce the costs of litigation by improving their control over unstructured content, and semistructured content, most notably e-mail. Our client references consistently report that they have cut costs and risks by taking control of litigation hold, litigation-hold-tracking, file collection, file processing and legal review, instead of outsourcing these functions.

The selection of eDiscovery software is a joint decision and sometimes a joint purchase between the IT department and the legal department. These two groups must work together to determine the needs of the organization and the individual users, and to build the business case for purchase. Although many corporations do not know the true costs of their legal activity, there is evidence that those costs are substantial. Because the work of legal and regulatory response is spread over different departments, and legal matters can span multiple years, traditional cost accounting does not do a good job of tracking the cost of litigation and regulation.

The legal department pays for outside counsel's services and eDiscovery providers; business units pay liability costs if a plaintiff wins a monetary judgment; and the IT department bears the expense of any internal discovery work. That makes it difficult to track costs in a meaningful way. In addition, litigation can go on for years, meaning a single case must be tracked over its lifetime. This, of course, does not follow the way accountants do things, which is on a yearly basis. Legal departments seldom have "budget" allocated to them but, of course, must pay the bills of outside counsel and other providers of legal services, and that money comes out of the legal reserve (see Note 1). Gartner clients that do track "all" legal costs, and that have purchased eDiscovery software, report that the software pays for itself in a matter of months, or is justified by the projected cost of "one big case."

The cost savings as reported by clients for early case assessment, along with in-house collection and preservation, can more than justify the purchase of moderately priced eDiscovery software ($100,000 to $500,000), or even more expensive software (costing more than $500,000). When interviewed for this MarketScope, clients reported a return on investment (ROI) within three to six months or, alternatively, after one big case, particularly intellectual property disputes (see Note 2). The main areas of cost reduction are in processing data by external service providers, as less time and, therefore, money is spent on outside attorney review, as less material is passed to them. These benefits are achieved by defensibly culling the amount of data that is passed on to further steps in the e-discovery process, by allowing in-house attorneys to "go back to the well" and refine their searches, either coming up with more data (to avoid sanctions) or refining existing data sets to the relevant documents to pass on for further consideration.

eDiscovery takes place at the request of outside counsel, or before counsel is retained, at the request of an internal legal department. The amount of material turned over to outside counsel for review has a direct bearing on the cost of litigation or regulatory investigation. Opportunities to reduce spending on both the processes of eDiscovery itself and the subsequent review by attorneys of materials obtained during eDiscovery are the heart of the eDiscovery vendors' value proposition.

Using this report, data center managers, information security officers, information architects, in-house legal personnel and records managers can find information to build a business case, create a list of possible vendors and determine which ones best meet their needs.

To review the full Gartner Report, please visit: http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/ca/vol2/article2/article2.html

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Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Government Intervention and Oversight Driving the Convergence of eDiscovery with Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC)

With the accelerating increase in the volume of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) along with increased government intervention and oversight, enterprises worldwide are experiencing an unprecedented increase in investigations and reporting  for eDiscovery and Governance, Risk  and Compliance (GRC).   With the financial pressures from today’s economic realities to reduce costs, you would have guessed that most enterprises would be investigating internalizing and centralizing the common activities of eDiscovery and GRC. 

However, as humorous, unbelievable or sad (or some combination of all three) as it may seem, this has just not been the case.

Historically, eDiscovery has been a reactive and outsourced process with little or no involvement from the Information Technology (IT) departments and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) has been something that the “bean counters” will worry about.

However, in 2010 and beyond with increased government intervention and oversight in just about every aspect of the corporate world,  enterprises worldwide are beginning to realize that eDiscovery and all of its associated practices and requirements and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and all of its associated practices and requirements, may actually be “one- in-the-same” from many respects.  In other words, these previously disparate and most times redundant practices of eDiscovery and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) are converging.

After all, how “forward thinking” do you need to be to “step back” from the daily complications of Global 2000 Information Technology (IT) and realize that, at some level and with a few paragraphs of caveats, it would be a “good thing” to retain all of this Electronically Stored Information (ESI) in some centralized repository, hook up one of today’s analytic platforms and then enable anyone within the enterprise, including eDiscovery and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) practitioners to extract the ESI that they need to full their requirements.

Well, if you throw Data Retention Policy along with enterprise intra and inter divisional politics and inability of legacy systems to talk to one another into the mix, it may be a bit more complicated that I have portrayed. And, if you consider the legal requirements and associated ramifications incumbent in collecting and process ESI for a legal matter, eDiscovery does have its fair share of subtle nuiaces to consider.

However, the fact remains that from a pure financial standpoint. most enterprises world wide will have no viable options short of “continuing to drop the ball” but to integrate and converge eDiscovery and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). 

Looking at this issue from an “investigative” standpoint, Albert Barsocchini, Guidance Software, wrote an excellent article that appeared on May 14, 2010 on the Wall Street and Technology Website titled, “Financial Institutions Now Taking a Holistic Approach to eDiscovery, Internal Investigations and Compliance”.

In this article, Mr. Barsocchini states that, “The 2009 financial meltdown has resulted in new lawsuits and the possibility of increased regulation for many financial firms. Pending legislation that will boost regulation of big banks and hedge funds are two recent examples of this trend. Similarly, legal action against Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and others illustrate the increasing need to be able to respond to an increase in both civil and criminal legal inquiries.”

He goes on to contend that, “These trends are driving a trend toward the corporate legal departments at financial institutions taking a unified approach on the mission critical functions of internal investigations, eDiscovery, audit and compliance. This has now become a boardroom-level issue. “

The “perfect storm is” is here and therefore it is time to stop debating about whether or not it is coming.  It is now time to debate how to deal with it.  Therefore, over the next 90 days, I am planning to evaluate and report on the “best-in-class” technologies and best practices that will provide the foundation for this convergence to occur.  I am also going to be reporting on several successful case studies.  So, I invite technology vendors, consultants and enterprises worldwide to contribute input and comments.  I look forward to hearing from you.

The full text of Mr. Barsocchini’s article is as follows:
 
The 2009 financial meltdown has resulted in new lawsuits and the possibility of increased regulation for many financial firms. Pending legislation that will boost regulation of big banks and hedge funds are two recent examples of this trend. Similarly, legal action against Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and others illustrate the increasing need to be able to respond to an increase in both civil and criminal legal inquiries.
These trends are driving a trend toward the corporate legal departments at financial institutions taking a unified approach on the mission critical functions of internal investigations, eDiscovery, audit and compliance. This has now become a boardroom-level issue.

Internal investigations can include issues involving human resource, fraud, unauthorized network access and intellectual property theft. eDiscovery can include both civil and criminal evidence collections as well as regulatory inquiries. Compliance covers data audit (personal identifiable information, record management enforcement, etc.), data security, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) fraud investigations, to name a few.
Traditionally, these types of investigations have been conducted by separate corporate departments and rarely have they been brought under one roof from a technology or departmental resource point of view.
Challenges Driving Convergence But recently, there has been a clear shift to consolidate these areas for efficiency, cost-effectiveness and other internal reasons. Companies are realizing that these departments can no longer operate in isolation and still meet today’s challenges.

There are a variety of challenges driving convergence, including increased litigation and internal investigations, the pressures of evolving case law, increasing volumes of data, reliance on smaller staffs and complex data privacy laws.

There’s also the possible need to defend the technology used in the investigation to prove that the computer program used to discover the computer evidence (ESI) generated authentic evidence. In these cases, the proponent of the evidence must testify to the validity of the program or programs utilized in the process. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc, 509 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469 (1993) is a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that sets forth a legal test to determine the validity of scientific evidence and its relevance to the case at issue. On the other hand, in state courts we see the Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923) test employed which is used to determine whether a scientific technique for obtaining, enhancing or analyzing evidence is generally accepted within the relevant scientific community as a valid process.

Judges are also behind this convergence trend, advocating that companies bring eDiscovery in house. For example in Phillip M. Adams & Assocs., L.L.C. v. Dell, Inc., 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 26964 (D. Utah Mar. 27, 2009) the court scolded the producing party, Phillip Adams, for not having appropriate technology to reasonable access potentially relevant electronically stored information (ESI). The court found it unacceptable for a party to hide behind inadequate information management systems as the reason why it could not produce relevant documents.

In Spieker v. Quest Cherokee, LLC, 2009 WL 2168892 (D. Kan. July 21, 2009) the court admonished the defendant for claiming they did not have the ability to generate the requested ESI materials in-house. "This court is aware of no case where a party has been excused from producing discovery because its employees ‘have not previously been asked to search for and/or produce discovery materials.”

Investigations are Similar in Nature

The typical investigation, no matter what practice area, tends to be reactive. Because every investigation is triggered by misconduct or legal proceedings, it is tempting to conduct every investigation in an ad hoc manner without any consistency. The more effective model is to conduct the investigation in a consistent manner under one roof using a single technology, if possible.

The ties that bind these internal inquiries are: they all have legal consequences and they all require similar investigation processes and techniques with similar consequences if not performed correctly. For example, the normal information security response to a network intrusion is to determine the scope of the breach, identify what data was compromised and patch the vulnerability. However, if these are not investigated properly, the company will not have the necessary evidence to properly prosecute a perpetrator either civilly or criminally. The information security department now needs to collect evidence properly according to forensic protocols and procedures for court validity, while at the same time doing their job to fix the breach.

Additionally, the typical triggering events (criminal misconduct, security breach, litigation, employee complaints, ethics hotlines, receipt of a subpoena, whistleblowers, competitors and customers, shareholder demands, regulatory audits and inquiries, responding to governmental investigations) for eDiscovery, compliance, security and audit requires immediate involvement from the legal department before any type of investigation can be initiated.

Legal-Centric Approach

Depending on the type of event trigger, the legal department should always be the first to be notified. They need to decide whether to investigate, who should be involved (human resources, the board of directors, outside counsel, security, etc.), the scope of the investigation, how it should be conducted and what will be done with the results of the investigation. This legal-centric approach provides companies with the best opportunity to get on top of the case early for early evaluation of the best “go forward” strategy.
This need for a unified approach is obvious when you see more cases involving network security issues, data privacy and the improper handling of electronically stored information. Because security, data privacy and collecting evidence can have significant legal consequences, corporate legal departments concerned about litigation and compliance are better equipped to coordinate and drive technology purchases than IT departments who are mainly concerned about data security and general computer network issues.
Overcoming institutional barriers within corporations is the biggest challenge to having a unified approach to eDiscovery, compliance and internal investigations. However, we are starting to see information security departments, IT and the legal departments work together to break down communication barriers and realize the benefits of cooperation and coordination.

The investigation risks are similar too - failure to find all relevant evidence, failure to properly preserve and authenticate relevant ESI, failure to meet deadlines, failure to document the process, failure to have a consistent workflow, unintentionally altering the evidence and evidence spoliation. Flawed investigations can seriously damage a corporation’s reputation, depress stock prices and hurt employee morale as well.

In all of these cases, the enterprises need to search, identify, preserve, collect and process evidence quickly for attorney or law enforcement or regulatory compliance review. Getting to the evidence over the network early is critical to the success or failure of an investigation.

For cost, efficiency, consistency and to mitigate risk, it makes sense to have a standardized, repeatable and defensible process for all types of corporate investigations. More companies today are creating a single team and using a single enterprise-class technology to perform these types of investigations. Companies without a coordinated policy and strategy will spend more on e-discovery, compliance and internal investigations than those taking a holistic approach.

Effective Response Plan
The need to become "investigation ready" is driving companies to assess, analyze and plan, and unify their investigation response practice. An effective response plan requires an organization to anticipate proactively the type of investigations that could be initiated and develop an offensive response strategy.

Technology is the linchpin to the overall implementation of a proactive response plan. When looking for enterprise technology to handle multiple types of computer investigations, look for technology that can search for evidence over the network from a central location, collect the evidence in a forensically sound manner and properly preserve all metadata. Additionally, having technology that can also do a network-based forensic examination is important for IP theft, SOX investigations and HR cases.

Recommended best practices include having a comphrensive corporate investigation and document retention policy, developing a repeatable process to properly identify and retain evidence for both civil and criminal matters, developing a response strategy for both inside and outside counsel, properly identifying event triggers and creating a decision tree, determining who in the enterprise should control and conduct the investigation, determining how the investigation should be conducted, what should the scope of the investigation be, and what will be done with the results of the investigation.

The rewards of becoming investigation ready and centralizing the process will help a company have a strategic advantage by quickly and efficiently identifying potential liability and effectively limiting risk while allowing the company to control the process before governmental or other third party intervention. It also gives the corporation more time to develop a response or defense strategy, which may ultimately minimize overall criminal and civil exposure and reduce the likelihood of lawsuits. Finally, it can make a corporation look more responsible to the courts, government regulators, shareholders, and auditors, thus minimizing the effect of any negative publicity that has arisen from allegations of wrongdoing while also satisfying the board’s fiduciary obligations to the stockholders.

Ultimately, the goal is to establish a legally-defensible response plan that builds upon prior experience, provides a common language and establishes an effective evidence lifecycle management framework to minimize risk and increase the effectiveness of an investigation. It is a critical piece of overall corporate policy. Combining these investigation areas will provide an organized business workflow that efficiently combines people, processes and technology.

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Monday, May 10, 2010

Early Case Assessment (ECA) Moving to The Corporations

eDiscovery InHouse Many eDiscovery vendors and consultants have seen more eDiscovery work moving back to the corporations. And, based on surveys over the past 12 months and direct discussions with eDiscovery decision makers within corporations, most industry analysts have predicted that eDiscovery work is moving back to the corporations at an accelerating rate. Now, The Cowan Group has confirmed this trend through the results of its "Q1 Critical Trends Survey". Collecting responses from 47 major corporations on their current workload, as well as near-term plans for technical and talent acquisitions, The Cowan Group is reporting that 22% of the corporations that they surveys are expecting to in-source more eDiscovery work within the next 90 days.

According to The Cowan Group Survey, 15% of the 47 major corporation indicated that they planned to move more eDiscovery collections in-house within the next 90 days. 35% of the respondents indicated that moving Early Case Assessment (ECA) in house was a top priority. 19% of the respondents indicated that they were considering an investment in Clearwell and 10% indicated that they were anticipating an investment in Relativity.
It appears that the trend of eDiscovery moving back to the corporations is indeed true.

So, the last 3 quarters of 2010 should be really good for the eDiscovery vendors and consultants that are fulfilling the requirements of the corporate legal departments.

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Monday, December 28, 2009

eDiscovery in 2010

The week between Christmas and New Years wouldn't be complete without a blog post about what the new year will bring to eDiscovery.

With the world economy in shambles, 2009 was not the best of times for the legal market and therefore many in legacy litigation services. Law firms reduced their ranks by the thousands and subsequently litigation service providers, consulting firms and litigation technology vendors had to tightened their belts and some even closed their doors. As a result, many long time players in the litigation services space found themselves without a job and without any real prospects for finding a new one.

In contrast, the eDiscovery market held its own and in some sectors even grew. Electronically Stored Information (ESI) collection and forensic consultants flourished and Early Case Assessment (ECA) technology matured and emerged as the front runner to address the financial and technology ills that had been plaguing eDiscovery for the past several years.

So, what will happen in 2010?

The Legacy Litigation Services Market Will Continue to Contract
As the legal market continues its accelerating paradigm shift from paper based evidence to ESI based evidence in 2010, the legacy litigation services market will continue to contract. As a result, the litigation service providers that have not been able to make the switch to processing ESI will be forced to close their doors and legacy litigation technology vendors will continue to lose marketshare.

eDiscovery Will Move to the Corporation
Just about every analyst in the world has predicted that eDiscovery processing in 2010 will become the responsibility of the Information Technology (IT) organizations within corporations. This will result in a dramatic reduction in revenue for the litigation services and eDiscovery departments within law firms and third party service providers. This move will also require a switch in sales and marketing strategies for eDiscovery technology vendors as they will have to start selling to the IT departments of the corporation.

Legacy Litigation Technology Will Lose Marketshare
With the volume of paper based evidence continuing to decrease and ESI processing requirements changing dramatically, monolithic first generation EDD platforms will continue to lose marketshare in 2010. Just like the cassette tape player has been replaced with solid state iPod technology, processes like TIFFing will become something that our grandfathers had to do.

Early Case Assessment (ECA) Will Continue to Flourish
Early Case Assessment (ECA) in all of its various forms will continue to mature. The market will settle on a definition of ECA. Through expanded exposure to the power of ECA, progressive judges will begin to understand the value of ECA technology and start to set expectations for its use in FRCP 26(f) discussions. And, the previous generation of litigators will make their "last stand" on the value of ECA technology.

Complex analytics and associated reporting will emerge as a requirement for ECA platforms. Users will begin to expect next generation conceptual search supported by leading edge semantic based technologies. Further, ECA platform will expand further to the right on the EDRM model and begin to encroach on the document review market with true First Pass Review (FPR) capabilities.

Project Management and Dashboard Technology Will Emerge
Base partly on the advancement ot technology and based partly on the expectations of the corporate IT departments, eDiscovery project management, workflow and realtime dashboard reporting will emerge in 2010. Many of the integrated eDiscovery platforms and stand alone ECA platforms will include new versions of these capabilities in their 2010 offerings. However, the real winners in this emerging market will be the pure PM/WF/Dashboard providers that enable users to integrate the various technologies in their tool kits and generate real time status across the entire eDiscovery lifecycle.

Cloud Computing and SaaS Based Technology Will Gain Acceptance
Cloud based computing technology and associated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery models will become an accepted alternative in 2010. As eDiscovery moves to the IT department, the cloud computing and SaaS based applications market will increase dramatically. And, as ROI is better understood and the myths regarding the security issues surrounding these technology are proven wrong, cloud computing and SaaS based applications will also expand its marketshare with law firms.

eDiscovery and GRC Will Begin to Merge
With corporations compelled to better understand and implement document retention best practices in 2010, the practice of eDiscovery will begin to emerge as a subset of corporate Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). Once a corporation has the ESI for the purpose of GRC, eDiscvoery will become just another reporting requirement.

Automated eDiscovery
As my posting on Web 3.0 predicted, technology driven eDiscovery will begin to emerge in 2010 as a method of increasing the speed and quality of eDiscovery while dramatically reducing the costs. 2010 will provide not see Hal900. But, we will see some very interesting technologies that enable eDiscovery knowledge workers to become much more efficient and accurate.

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Thursday, December 17, 2009

Gartner Confirms that the eDiscovery Software Market is Growing

Over the past several months I have been conducting some informal polls on LinkedIn regarding whether or not there was ever a recession in eDiscovery and if so, whether the recession is now over. As I expected, the feedback was mixed. I have also authored several Blog posts that contended that the eDiscovery market was actually expanding this year for those providers that were providing the "right" stuff at the "right" price. Not surprisingly, I got push back from those consultants and technology vendors in the industry who were in fact feeling the pressures of the current economic conditions and some support from those who were actually having pretty good years.

Again, not surprisingly, Gartner just released the results of a study that indicates that worldwide electronic-discovery (e-discovery) software revenue is on pace to total $1 billion in 2009, a 25 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $807.6 million. They went on to indicate that in 2010, the market is forecast to surpass $1.2 billion, a 23 percent increase from 2009.

Once again, I have to comment that the eDiscovery technology market is really great place to be right now. And, I can't wait to see what Gartner has to say about the Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) markets.

The other results as reported in the Gartner Study by Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner was that transparency of business performance as aligned to governance, risk, and compliance regulations and subsequent organizational reporting, mitigating IT risk through the use of real-time and continuous controls monitoring for transactions, segregation of duties, application configuration, and master data and preventing business failure through fraud detection, improved user-level and application-level security, and corruption were the three important eDiscovery market catalysts that underscore the importance of linking business goals to IT risks and the ability to manage both. More to come on this in future Blog posts.

The full text of Gartner's press release is a follows:

STAMFORD, Conn., December 16, 2009 —   Worldwide electronic-discovery (e-discovery) software revenue is on pace to total $1 billion in 2009, a 25 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $807.6 million, according to Gartner, Inc. In 2010, the market is forecast to surpass $1.2 billion, a 23 percent increase from 2009.

E-discovery is the identification, preservation, collection, preparation, review and production of electronically stored information associated with legal and government proceedings. E-discovery technology can be provided as a stand-alone application, embedded in other applications or services, or accessed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.

“Increasingly, more organizations are being confronted with litigation regarding bribery and corruption, foreign corrupt practices, securities and financial fraud, government contracting abuses, and healthcare fraud,” said Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner. “Such unplanned events underscore the need for more-effective enterprise information strategy and information governance policies.”

Mr. Eid said that the e-discovery market is in a period of simultaneous growth and consolidation that should last through 2011. Market and technology consolidation will continue during the next several years as vendors expand their product and service portfolios, obtain market-centric expertise, and acquire new customer bases. As the e-discovery market shifts from an emerging market to a high-growth market, Gartner expects new vendor entrants and nontraditional competitors to participate through technology partnerships and acquisitions.

Until now, vendor revenue for e-discovery has focused on the U.S., with approximately 90 percent of market revenue for 2008. However, going forward, market growth is also expected in common-law jurisdictions, such as Australia, Canada, South Africa and the U.K., as new civil litigation regulations are passed regarding privacy and disclosure. In addition, many organizations based in the U.S. have subsidiaries in countries around the world that will provide further pockets of regional growth.

“The December 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP) in the U.S. regarding the discovery of electronically stored information (ESI) and passing of subsequent similar statutes in other countries, has really spurred market interest in e-discovery,” said Mr. Eid. “This is prompting many companies to rethink their overall information management strategies, from the policy level to the implementation level.”

Mr. Eid said three important e-discovery market catalysts underscore the importance of linking business goals to IT risks and the ability to manage both. The three core market catalysts are:

- Transparency of business performance as aligned to governance, risk, and compliance regulations and subsequent organizational reporting.
- Mitigating IT risk through the use of real-time and continuous controls monitoring for transactions, segregation of duties, application configuration, and master data.
- Preventing business failure through fraud detection, improved user-level and application-level security, and corruption.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Dataquest Insight: E-Discovery Software Marketplace Continues Its High Growth Pace." The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1228213.

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Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Top 10 CIO Priorities for 2010 Through the GRC/eDiscovery Prisim

As eDiscovery moves into the IT deparments of the Global 2000 as a subset of GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance), I plan to start talking more and more about the eDiscovery paradigm shift in the context of the IT department. As such, this morning I ran across the results of the The Society for Information Management (SIM) surveyed CIOs and IT executive leaders about their top priorities for 2010, based on a list of 20 IT and business concerns. A great summary of the results of this survey can be found on the Network World website in a Septebmer 25, 2009 article by Denise Dubie titled, "CIOs seek better results, lower costs".

When looked at through the prisim of eDiscovey, The Top ten trends for CIO's reveals some interesting results:

1. Business productivity and cost reduction (investing in GRC/eDiscovery technology and best practices to enable more proactive as opposed to reactive ESI management represents the potential for tremendous reductions in the overall cost of ESI management).
2. IT and business alignment (Aligning/prioritizing the requirements of GRC/eDiscovery within IT will pay big dividends for the business)
3. Business agility and speed to market (brining eDiscovery in-house will pay big dividends and offer expanded business agility in dealinig with litigation)
4. Business process reengineering (Lean Six Sigma practices will play a big role in the development of GRC/eDiscovery best practices).
5. IT cost reduction (Apporpriately addressing the requirements of eDiscovery may represent the biggest opportunity to reduce costs).
6. IT reliability and efficiency (Emerging GRC/eDiscovery technology will lead to better overall ESI mangement and increase IT reliability and efficiency).
7. IT strategic planning (GRC/eDiscovery should be on the top of every strategic planning list).
8. Revenue-generating IT innovations (GRC/eDiscovery innovation will address provide opportunities to fulfill this trend).
9. Security and privacy concerns (The very nature of GRC/eDiscovery will enable IT departments to address the security and ESI privacy concerns immediately).
10. CIO leadership (GRC/eDiscovery issues should enable CIO's to take a seat at the board level).

The full text of the article by Ms. Dubie is as follows:

More than half of nearly 250 CIOs, CTOs and IT executives surveyed by the Society for Information Management (SIM) said their top business concern in 2009 is business productivity and cost reduction. About one-third of respondents noted IT and business alignment as a concern, followed by close to one-fourth who indicated they were concerned with business agility and speed to market. Nearly 20% of those surveyed by SIM said business process re-engineering topped their list and 17% listed IT cost reduction, which ranked fifth among IT management concerns in SIM’s 2009 IT Industry Trend Survey.

“The results of the study confirm that the economic downturn has caused a significant shift in priorities,” said Jerry Luftman, a former SIM vice president and executive director of Graduate Information Systems Programs and distinguished professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, in a statement. “IT executives are focusing on ensuring that business is conducted efficiently to get more mileage out of their budgets.”

And while cost-cutting remains a priority, SIM’s findings show that IT compensation might not continue to be impacted. Some 80% of respondents said staff salaries stayed the same or increased in 2009, and 91% expect pay to remain flat or increase in 2010. As for budgets, 52% experienced budget decreases in 2009, but looking ahead to 2010, 27% expects IT funds to increase and 45% expect finances the stay the same

Among the technologies and IT project areas that respondents indicated to SIM were a priority in the coming months are business intelligence, server virtualization, ERP systems, customer corporate portals, enterprise application integration and continuity planning/disaster recovery.
Separately, the Computer Technology Industry Association, or CompTIA, polled some 200 U.S.-based IT organizations and learned that overall the confidence in business is growing. The survey revealed that nearly half of companies polled expect to increase investment in research and development and other revenue generating initiatives. It also found that nearly one-third plan to increase spending on technology. And more than half of those surveyed expect to keep staff levels the same, while nearly 30% expect to increase hiring in the next six months.

Looking ahead “67% of firms rate the outlook for the IT industry positively, compared to 55% today,” the report states.

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