Last Friday I attended an event on the best practices and challenges of information governance sponsored by Hewlett Packard. It featured a round table circled by industry experts. Randolph A. Kahn, Esq., of Kahn Consulting, moderated the discussion with: Sue Derison, director of information systems at Forsyth County, Georgia, School System; Mark Saussure, director of Information Technology Services at Penn State University; and Martin Loeber, vice president of litigation and general counsel at Valero.
On the challenges, the panel identified the deluge of information (Mr. Saussure) and how to use information and records to create efficiencies for clients and constituents (Ms. Derison). Of particular interest for this blog was Mr. Loeber’s observations. He identified the risk of not retaining documents that should be preserved for litigation as a primary concern and, of late, the challenge to minimize the amount of information delivered to outside counsel in e-discovery -- thus reducing litigation costs.
To meet the information challenges and mitigate identified risks, Valero's best practice includes a documented and well-implemented retention policy and an investment in HP’s Integrated Archive Platform and Clearwell Systems technology. The IAP aims to manage structured and unstructured data so that Valero can know what it has and know what it does not have, quickly. With Clearwell’s technology, Valero aims to reduce the amount of data sent to outside counsel for review using Clearwell’s early-case assessment, deduplication, and review tools. With the HP-Clearwell combination, Loeber advised the audience to be “as proactive as you can to reduce reactivity.”
All told, it is good to hear what people are doing to meet the challenges of information governance. When you can't attend conferences to dialogue with peers, keep an eye out for live webinars like this, or perhaps their archive. At the very least, you might learn something knew -- like XAM.
thanks for you
Posted by: chat sohbet | May 13, 2009 at 12:05 PM