Email: Unsticking the Glue

Discovery is the newest driver behind companies finally getting onto the electronic archive bandwagon. Similar, I suppose, to regulatory compliance, but far more threatening and immediate to most companies. Not every company has to face the FDA or the SEC, but just about everybody gets sued eventually.

Bob seconds that: "Companies realize they have needs from a discovery perspective even if they don't feel like they have the same compliance requirements. It's expensive to do discovery, and the biggest companies face multiple litigations every year...they know this! So, like compliance, people expect that their archiving system will take care of their ‘ediscovery' needs. And if you've done a good job, you have an advantage in your response to a discovery request," he explains. "Good compliance and good discovery are both as much about creating solid business practices as they are about anything else. Define the policies, then make sure you have an infrastructure that can support those polices. When organizations do that, they not only operate more efficiently, and control their costs, but they're also able to be proactive and prepared for the business challenges that emerge from regulations and discovery.

"After all," Bob continues, "there's no difference between finding something for a discovery request, and finding something for your internal desire to use the knowledge in a business process. The technology's the same. If you put the right infrastructure in, you can get benefits from both; if you put the wrong infrastructure in, you have to react all the time. Companies should look at the technology they're contemplating, and ask themselves: ‘Does it help me from an IT cost perspective?' ‘Does it help me meet regulatory requirements?' ‘Does it help me with discovery requests?' A good system should do ALL of that and be a triple bang for the buck."

Which only serves to make the ROI calculation that much harder to do, I add. "Yes," says Bob, "the specific ROI can be vague. But it is the differentiator among vendors. An ROI analysis is the only yardstick you have to compare different systems." And if the ROI is spread among the various stakeholders—IT, general counsel, business owners, executives—who, at the end of the day controls the decision? "It depends on the organization," says Little. "As a vendor, we have to be able to talk to everyone. And EVERYONE thinks the OTHER part of the organization is the Dark Side. The IT guys say, ‘If only I didn't have general counsel breathing down my neck.' And general counsel says, ‘If only IT could be responsive to my needs and understood my pain.'"

The truly bad thing is that they bring in different vendors to handle the different parts of the problem, and they end up with systems that don't cooperate and play in the sandbox nicely. That ultimately increases costs and risk.

"When that happens, we have to come in and clean up," admits Little. "We act as mediator between business, general counsel and IT. We have to make them aware that a lot of their requirements, at a basic level, are the same. We just give them a language to build a case for what they ALL want to accomplish, together.

"They're all different," continues Little, "but they're also the same. For example, if you talk to a healthcare company versus a law firm, the technology is the same; what's important is the language you use to explain the benefits in terms that are important to that customer. We train our salesforce to understand industry verticals. We're doing more of our marketing in that fashion, so that organizations in any vertical can understand how these horizontal technologies—and in many cases horizontal drivers—have an impact on them. You become, in essence, their advisor."

How To Do It Right; A Real-Life Account

A day or so after I talked with Bob Little, I had a chance to spend some quality telephone time with my friend Johannes Scholtes, president of ZyLAB North America LLC. Johannes is a charismatic guy and a lot of fun to be around. If you ever want to find the best microbrew-and-corned-beef-sandwich place in just about any city on the planet, I advise you to follow Johannes.

He's also unpredictable. I intended to conduct, basically, the same interview with him as I did with Bob. But things don't always go according to plan... which in this case is a good thing. Scholtes took our chat as a way to illustrate the practical matters associated with email management. To a great extent, he used his own company as a prime example. Thanks, Jan... now I get it.

We start innocently enough. The new amendments to the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure (FRCP) had just been enacted. Without getting too detailed here (see the other articles in this White Paper for deeper analysis), these provide guidelines for Federal Court judges to describe what they can ask for in a lawsuit, and what companies can do to prepare. I do NOT remember CNN covering it, but in some circles it was a pretty big deal, I suggested to Scholtes. "Really?" he asked, "I know it is now, but I wonder if by February anyone will still think it's a hot topic?"

I don't know, I tell him. But what's your take on it right now? "FRCP is very good news. Some of the commercial document conversion service companies are going to be VERY happy, because they'll make a fortune," he laughs. "But seriously, as a company, you can go bankrupt just because someone sues you and asks for all your documents. It's extremely expensive to go back through five years of backup tapes and convert them all," he says. He's right; some very famous companies have spent millions in preparing for litigation, then losing on top of that!

"We've helped people all over the world deal with discoveries and disclosures when they're in trouble," says Johannes. "And I've seen the amount of money they've had to spend. I've seen collections of data so large... I've seen people have to restore more than a year's worth of backup tapes—52, one for every week—with each more than 90 gigabytes. You end up with 10 tera- bytes of data. First, there's a zillion duplicate files to get rid of. Then you have to full-text index. And you have to review everything. An experience like that would bankrupt most companies."

At least with the new FRCP rules, some of this cost can be avoided, I asked? "Yes, now you have a guideline as a company. So you set up a filing plan, which is a good thing anyway. We did it ourselves a while ago, and I can tell you that for a medium-sized company, it's not that hard. You end up with maybe 20-25 types of archives, and a filing plan for each of those. The biggest problem is training employees, and enforcing that they are actually using the filing plan. Then comes the REAL big problem: email."

Scholtes then goes on to tell me a first-person account of electronic information management—his own company, ZyLAB, deployed a centralized archive for electronic documentation and, mostly notably, email just a couple years ago. "We had to eat our own dog food," he calls it. Here's his story:

"We did it because we wanted to get ISO 9001 certification. Our customers, especially local and state government, but also pharma companies and some manufacturers, demand that their suppliers be ISO-certified. Without it, many of them would have ignored our proposals.