ECM Briefs

Enterprise content management isn’t only an issue for corporations – it’s also a huge concern for government agencies including the military. The 46th Test Wing (TW) at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is the premier test and evaluation center for Air Force air-delivered weapons, navigation/guidance systems, and Command and Control (C2) systems. A key administrative requirement for the 46th TW is to produce a Test Directive document that ensures that regulatory compliance, safety, environmental, and technical requirements are being met.

In the past, Test Directives were produced on paper and manually routed for review, approval, signature and distribution. Tracking and oversight required multiple phone calls to determine where the document was in the process. The cost of producing, sending, tracking and maintaining these paper documents was high and there was no clear document control system.

How did the 46th TW solve the problem? In cooperation with the base’s multimedia center, a low-cost, (17 cents per page), high-speed scanning business office was established that also provided a full-text searchable image of the documents. These documents were archived in Livelink ECM. A hyperlink to the documents is provided to a distribution list via email. With two clicks of the mouse, the document is displayed on the requestor’s monitor. This method does not burden the email system with large attachments. One electronic copy is maintained in Livelink ECM and viewable by all.

Over a six-month period, the 46th Test Wing realized a cost savings of $30,578 by eliminating the distribution of paper copies and saved an estimated 1,657 work hours that were previously used to make paper copies, package them for distribution, route them, and collect the package on the other end and file it. You can learn more about this implementation here.

Few industries can rival the legal market when it comes to volume of electronic documents and email. Law firms, which are relatively small compared to the average Fortune 500 corporation, have adopted ECM technologies to help them manage the daily flood of information. Like most organizations, however, the needs of law firms continue to evolve.

What are some of the biggest ECM challenges facing law firms today? To find out, we spoke to Mohit “Mo” Thawani, a co-founder of LegalKEY® Technologies and now head of Open Text’s Legal Solutions Group, who has more than 12 years of experience helping law firms overcome their most pressing information challenges. Over the past several weeks, Mo has had numerous consultations with law firm customers at events such as LegalTech® New York and Open Text’s Summit 2007, as well as conversations with members of Open Text’s Legal CIO Advisory Board.

What do you see as some of the key information management challenges facing the legal market today?

Mo Thawani (MT): Following recent discussions with customers, I have to say there are three that stand out: managing email overload to meet ediscovery requirements and mitigate risk; finding the most effective means of identifying conflicts of interest and addressing other risk-management issues when undergoing a merger with another law firm; and understanding how Microsoft plays into the law firm environment with SharePoint.

Let’s start with email management. What are the issues and what do law firms need to do?

MT: If a law firm doesn’t have proper records management technologies in place for all content, including email, firms are exposed to risk, lost opportunities, and higher storage costs.

The majority of client communication occurs via email and some of this communication is considered a record that should be tracked as part of the client file and stored for the necessary retention periods. However, archiving alone may not be the best answer. Many of our customers are telling us that they are concerned about the risks involved in just blindly archiving email. Many want to move away from this practice, in favor of a program that applies a clear records lifecycle to email. The goal is to have a retention strategy that archives important emails associated with a particular matter, improving discovery capabilities. This allows firms to manage the risks of email, and get the performance benefits of archiving while reducing the burden on email servers. We offer email management solutions that let users organize and search for email in a client/matter environment, declare and file email as appropriate records, and then apply the retention schedule as the matter ends, all the way to the destruction of the email.

What are the risk management issues for merging law firms?

MT: With the increasingly competitive legal marketplace, mergers are the answer for many law firms. However, when considering a merger, law firms must determine potential client conflicts that could arise between the two firms. Ineffective conflicts checking processes can lead to serious consequences such as malpractice claims, lost business opportunities, and a jeopardized reputation.

A conflicts-checking system such as LegalKEY Conflicts Management, make it easier to catch potential problems. The system can analyze client lists from each firm, perform a conflicts check against both systems and determine if there are any conflicts that could negate the deal.

Why do customers want better integration with Microsoft technologies?

MT: At the end of the day, law firms are looking for solutions that will help lawyers do their work more effectively and productively. When talking to our customers and members of our Legal CIO Advisory Board, we’ve found that they want to be able to get all data for a particular matter from one place. So, instead of having to go into their DM system to get documents, and then to LegalKEY to check records in and out, and then another application to get financial or time and billing information, they want to be able to access all information related to matter from where they live, and where they live is in Microsoft Outlook.

By giving attorneys and legal staff access to all related information on a specific client matter from within the familiar Outlook environment this will increase productivity since end users do not need to spend their day opening and closing different applications to get to their work. With the combination of Open Text and Hummingbird technologies and know-how, Open Text is now uniquely positioned to offer this capability to the legal market.

And with our recently announced DM X offering, the new Rich Client will feature fully customizable dynamic business views available through Microsoft Explorer, Microsoft Outlook 2007 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system authoring applications. It will give clients a front end that will work with their choice of DM repository, and below that will be the Open Text Enterprise Library Services which will offer tightly integrated content archiving, metadata management, search and enterprise records management to help our clients address governance and regulatory compliance requirements.

Should Open Text customers expect further integration with Microsoft technologies down the road?

MT: We’re working closely with Microsoft, and specifically with the SharePoint platform, to develop additional functionality designed specifically for law firms. We hope to have more details by the end of May about how our law firm customers will be able to better leverage their investment in Microsoft technologies.

In the months ahead, Open Text legal customers will be introduced to many complementary products, features, and comprehensive solutions that the combined Hummingbird and Open Text technologies bring to the table.

An important upcoming event is Convergence V, the annual user conference for LegalKEY customers where they can preview new and expanded offerings for professional services firms. The event is being held May 6 – 9, 2007 at the Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa. For more information, go to Convergence V for more details and early registration discounts.

This week Forrester Research published The Forrester Wave™: Records Management, Q1 2007, published on March 14, 2007 and authored by Barry Murphy, with Connie Moore. The report provides an excellent overview of what analyst Barry Murphy calls the “rapidly growing” records management market. You can find an executive summary of the Forrester report at www.forrester.com. And we have pulled together a variety of helpful resources here.

In addition to the traditional drivers of compliance regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley and SEC Rule 17a-4, Forrester reports that litigation is the “hot new driver” in RM as enterprises seek to address the challenges presented by the new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that took effect on December 1, 2006.

According to the report: “Over the next five years, North American businesses and government agencies will spend close to $5 billion on eDiscovery technology alone — technology that helps collect, process, review, and produce information in response to internal or regulatory investigations and litigation. RM tools can play a role across the whole process, especially in helping proactively collect and manage information.”

As part of our focus on providing enterprises with a complete eDiscovery solution, we partnered with TCDI, one of the experts in this segment, to create Livelink ECM -- Litigation Management, which we announced last year. This enterprise software “mashup” has proven to be an ideal fit, combining our proven records management solution with TCDI’s leading collection, review and production tools. This approach allowed us to introduce an end-to-end litigation readiness solution in less time and with more features than would have been possible otherwise.

As this shows, compelling mashups aren’t just limited to the Web or mapping applications – the concept applies in many areas of software development.

There’s no lack of research telling us that it’s time to move beyond terabytes and petabytes and start thinking in terms of exabytes or even zettabytes when it concerns the world’s data. While those numbers often include transitive data such as TV transmissions, phone calls or junk mail, it’s clear that the amount of information that needs to be stored, cataloged and managed continues to grow at an astounding rate. For corporations facing a daunting array of government guidelines and the ever-present threat of litigation, all this data represents an especially large challenge.

Ten years ago Motorola faced such data management challenges as islands of information (fileshares, individual websites), no enterprise search and no easy way to publish and share information. To address the challenge, in April 1997 Motorola deployed an Enterprise Content Management solution based on Open Text software. Now, 10 years later, Motorola uses ECM software to manage 16 million documents, 20 million versions, 33 terabytes (100 GB per day or 2 terabytes net growth per month), and 70,000 users world-wide.

Needless to say, Motorola’s experience shows that while the amount of data is indeed vast, proper implementation of enterprise-class software can keep it from mushrooming out of control. You can learn more about how Motorola achieved user adoption, advanced ECM, shaped knowledge managers, and created a culture where content is expected to be in the system during a March 29, 2007 Webcast featuring Brad Bosley of Motorola’s Corporate IT group.

In the meantime, look here to bone up on your exabytes and zettabytes.

The release of new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) late last year formalize what many companies have known for a long time: it pays to be prepared for electronic discovery. In our litigious environment, preparation can make all the difference as outlined in this white paper Litigation Readiness: The Best Offense is a Great Defense.

It’s no surprise then that Forrester Research analyst Barry Murphy forecasts major expansion in this market in his December 2006 report Believe It — eDiscovery Technology Spending To Top $4.8 Billion By 2011. He says the FRCP will “drive short-term growth for reactive eDiscovery solutions, while the desire to wrap eDiscovery into broader retention management strategies will drive significant market growth for years to come.”

To help enterprises get started with eDiscovery solutions, we’ve compiled a list of five key strategies that can help you sharpen your ability to manage information, and better respond to discovery requests. These are detailed in a press release we issued today and summarized below:

1. Define defensible policies
2. Enforce policies with records management
3. Centrally control all enterprise content
4. Retain business records
5. Extend with litigation support

To further help your legal and IT teams understand the issues and solutions available for meeting the requirements of the FRCP amendments, we’ve compiled a number of resources. This includes a podcast featuring Timothy Carroll, co-chair of the records management practice at Vedder Price, a leading business law firm based in Chicago with a large litigation and eDiscovery practice and Open Text Executive Vice President Bill Forquer. Other resources are an eDiscovery webinar and information on our litigation readiness solutions.

The way we all consume news and information is radically changing. If you want to find out about something, a quick Internet search yields thousands of results instantly. And with RSS feeds, more and more people are used to having their news pushed to them automatically for online consumption. With RSS, you get just the information you want when you want it.

And that’s where ECM Briefs comes in. If you’re interested in enterprise content management software trends, technology and applications, ECM Briefs will help keep you informed. We figured that Open Text, the largest independent provider of ECM software and solutions – a company whose executives have written three books on ECM software – might have some interesting, ahem, content.

In contrast to the formal press-release medium, ECM Briefs are shorter and cover a much broader range of topics. In some ways ECM Briefs are like a blog in that we’re using blogging software as the publishing medium. However, it’s more instructive to think of this as a news wire feed, with crisp news articles, news features, Q&As, event reports and even case studies coming down the pipe on a regular basis. To be sure we’ll be tapping a broad cross-section of authors and resources, with credit given and contact information made available.

We’re excited about what this new feature holds for engaging with the industry at large. We hope you’ll add us to your feed reader, or check back often. Feedback is always welcome.

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