The Datamax Thinking Blog

Educating, collaborating, and sparking ideas for maximizing the technology that matters.


Electronic Data Discovery

If you are smart, you’ll prepare for the event that you might need to be ready for electronic data discovery.

I read an interesting post at Computer World. Robin Harris wrote a post called the Two-minute guide to Electronic Data Discovery.There is some pretty interesting points in there that I believe everyone responsible for data in a business should understand. I think that this is a prime example of how IT and business managers really need to work together to be ready for eventualities in business especially when it comes to document management policies.

One thing that struck me was that it is not IT responsibility to define data retention or destruction strategies. She made three important points:

Your company’s lawyers and record management folks are responsible for setting electronic data retention policy - not IT IT must take the lead, working with policy makers, in architecting an economic and effective infrastructure to ensure compliance IT needs a documented process whose ownership lies outside IT for unscheduled data destruction - such as when a VP wants all their emails to a client deleted - and staff must be trained on it.

If you are interested in seeing a summary of important information regarding electronic data discovery, you can go to the US Courts website.

Corey Smith provides common sense solutions to business problems at his blog.