eDiscovery Daily Blog

• June 19, 2017

In this era of big data, an organization’s ability to govern and preserve digital information, especially long-term digital information, is key. Earlier this month, the Information Governance Initiative (IGI), working closely with IGI Supporter Preservica, provided a benchmark of the state of the industry on the critical issue of governing and preserving long-term digital information.  Let’s take a look.

In its second annual survey of IG professionals regarding the use of long-term digital information (i.e., longer than ten years), IGI and Preservica had several interesting findings.  Last year, their benchmark report illustrated an interesting finding that virtually every responding organization (98%) needs digital information for longer than ten years, but very few (16%) have a viable approach.  This year’s survey had some interesting findings as well, such as:

• The vast majority of responding organizations (83%) realize (or plan to realize) direct business value from their long-term digital information, targeting areas like market analysis, product development, and customer service;
• The top 3 challenges preventing organizations from getting business value from their long-term digital information are: 1) Lack of personnel dedicated to the issue, 2) Organizations capability in this area is informal or immature, and 3) Organizations lack the proper tools or technology;
• Not surprisingly, IG professionals indicated that the C-Suite is affected the most by failure to effectively govern and preserve digital information, with CEOs, General Counsels, heads of Records Management, CIOs, and Boards of Directors are those most affected by failure in this area;
• Business functions most requiring long-term digital information included Legal operations (79% of respondents), Financial management (67%), HR management (64%) and IP management (48%);
• Business applications most containing long-term digital information included Collaboration environments (80% of respondents), Accounting systems (75%), Contract management systems (71%), Transactional systems (58%), Messaging systems (55%) and Case management systems (54%);
• The most critical capabilities to preserving and governing long-term digital information are Ensuring readability and usability of information (89%), Proving authenticity and trustworthiness (79%), Supporting records retention and disposition requirements (79%), Providing secure access and discovery to business users (62%), Conformance with standards for digital preservation (59%) and Automated transfer of records from operational systems to long-term digital preservation systems (51%).

To see a summary and download a copy of the Infographics for this report, click here (signup required, but it’s free).

So, what do you think?  Are you surprised the extent of the need for digital information longer than ten years?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.