Perspectives on information life cycle management

Analytics help customers to know what is working. "Some of our customers routinely take that information into their daily editorial meetings," Carroll says. In addition, content can be fed into a formal records management system. That feature is particularly valuable for customers that need to treat certain Web content as a formal record.

On the compliance front

Information life cycle management from a compliance point of view remains a dynamic growth area. Several product trends are making that challenge somewhat more manageable. New software solutions are combining process and content into functionally oriented solutions that simplify compliance. Forrester Research predicts that the global governance risk and compliance (GRC) platform market will reach $1.3 billion by 2011, and that the market for e-discovery, a portion of which is directed toward life cycle management, will exceed $4 billion.

Exterro Fusion from Exterro is a Web-based discovery management and workflow platform that is designed to provide complete visibility for the discovery process. One of its modules, Exterro Legal Hold Management, manages the legal hold portion of the discovery process. It offers templates for legal hold notices, an internal workflow for hold approval, and notices that intercept automated processes for document retention and deletion within the IT department.

Without a formal hold process, e-discovery can become very chaotic. "If a company is relying on e-mails, phone calls and spreadsheets, management becomes very inefficient," says Bobby Balachadran, CEO of Exterro. "The critical aspect of legal hold is its ability to quickly say that the system contains the documents and that the proper hold has been initiated. We have hooks into applications, data sources and other systems including records management and archiving systems."

Exterro Fusion helps bring together the various stakeholders who have a role in managing the life cycle of a company’s documents, e-mails and other information. "Attorneys know which cases they have and need to put on hold," Balachadran says, "while the RM people are in a different world, managing retention." For example, the e-mail archive might have automatic disposition triggers, but Fusion fills the gap between people who need to put information on hold, and those who manage retention.

Document and records management vendors are aware of the need for more coordination throughout the life cycle management process and are looking broadly at an integrated strategy for enterprise content management (ECM).

"Increasingly, we are seeing customers not just interested in standalone RM or RM with archiving," says Cheryl McKinnon, director of collaborative content management at Open Text (opentext.com), "but in an end-to-end life cycle so they can capture content from the first keystroke." That applies strongly to e-mail, notorious for causing problems because of volume and poor management.

Nalco Company, a water treatment and process improvement company, has selected Open Text to manage all of its content, replacing a legacy content management and collaboration infrastructure. One of the issues that prompted the change was the difficulty in integrating Nalco’s enterprise resource planning system, SAP, into that infrastructure. LiveLink ECM will allow Nalco to include the SAP data in the ECM repository, as well as e-mail. Open Text also provides imaging capability, document management and records management. The goal is to manage all content through the life cycle of creating, capturing, sharing and archiving.

A better-integrated system for managing the information life cycle leads to improved overall performance, according to McKinnon. "Now that organizations have started to understand what the compliance pressures mean for them, they are looking for the productivity and efficiency they can get," she says. Routine workflows can be built in to handle daily work and simultaneously support the need for compliance.

On the horizon is a lot of buzz about bringing Web 2.0 content into the enterprise. "Interesting questions are being raised about whether companies should use blogs and wikis for product announcements if this information is not captured and managed," McKinnon says. "What happens if a lawyer uses a blog? Should the information be treated as it would be if it were an e-mail?"

The challenge, she says, is to balance innovation with a level of security that ensures information will not become harmful to the organization through the failure to manage it effectively.