eDiscovery Daily Blog

eDiscovery Trends: Deidre Paknad on CGOC’s Information Lifecycle Governance Leader Reference Guide

 

Yesterday, we talked about the Information Lifecycle Governance Leader Reference Guide from the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council (CGOC).  The guide provides a program for operationalizing an effective defensive disposal program for expired data, which is an increasingly important issue for many organizations as organizational data doubles every 18-24 months.

Deidre Paknad, Director of Information Lifecycle Governance (ILG) Solutions for IBM, is a well-known thought leader in the legal and information governance domain and one of the authors of the guide, as well as the founder of CGOC (and also a previous thought leader interviewee on this blog).  Deidre has also been a member of several Sedona Conference working groups since 2005 and has co-chaired the EDRM IGRM project since 2010.  I recently interviewed Deidre and asked her some questions regarding the goals for the guide, the target audience and how it fits in with other information governance initiatives in the industry.

Who is the target audience for this guide in terms of job functions and/or size of organization?

The guide is for companies and their Information Governance leaders who are looking to transform legal, records and IT practices to drive substantial cost savings and risk reduction.  It is for business leaders or stakeholders such as the Chief Information Officer (CIO), General Counsel (GC) and records managers who are looking for program models to define, operationalize and improve processes that enable defensible disposal of unnecessary data. The goal is to curb storage growth and lower costs associated with IT, eDiscovery and processing, to not only save money but also lower organizational risk going forward. Based on insight from 1700+ CGOC corporate practitioners, it is apparent that organizations with extensive preservation requirements due to litigation and regulation requirements who retain large amounts of data are in need of such a leadership guide.

Are there any success stories or examples of organizations using the principles described in this guide that you can provide?

Yes. We just had a very successful summit in February with more than 100 corporate practitioners (the proceedings documentation from the CGOC web site are available here).  Anthony Perkins of BNY Mellon provided the keynote speech regarding the high cost of information and how IT organizations are responding.  BNY Mellon and several others are setting new benchmarks and advancing ILG practices for defensible disposal that have become strategic enterprise initiatives.  Scott Bancroft of Novartis International also shared their experience in how they structured an effective governance program.  In the panel discussion, practitioners (such as Jason R. Baron of the National Archives and Records Administration, Eckhard Herych of Novartis and Mark Tabs and Thomas Zingale of UBS) shared their own experience and leadership on assessing process maturity to drive process improvement.  From those proceedings, you can see how Legal, RIM, IT and program office leaders (i.e., members of our target audience) share their experience to modernize their practices and collectively transform their enterprise processes for cost saving and risk reduction.

As this guide references the Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM) – which, of course, is a part of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) – how does this guide and the efforts of CGOC fit in with the EDRM-ARMA initiative?

We established CGOC in 2004 and it has grown to a community of over 1700 experts in retention, legal holds, discovery, and privacy exclusively for corporate practitioners. Its charter is to create a forum in which Legal, IT, RIM, Privacy and compliance executives can get the insight, interaction, and information they need to make good business decisions. CGOC fills the critical practitioners’ gap between ARMA and The Sedona Conference, providing the ability to move from theory to efficient practices. CGOC also provides educational seminars, benchmarking surveys, group workshops, an annual Summit and retreat, white papers by expert faculty, a professional networking website, and regional working groups to corporate litigation, discovery, privacy, records management and program office leaders and practitioners.  Membership in the forum is free to qualified executives.

What are your expectations/goals/hopes that you envision for how the guide is used and adopted?

In the fall of 2010, CGOC issued its Information Governance Benchmark Report, which presented findings from their first survey of legal, records management (RIM) and IT practitioners in Global 1000 companies. The report confirmed that CGOC members viewed defensible disposal as the most essential outcome of a good governance program  but revealed challenges with funding and cross organizational cooperation that impeded program launch or effectiveness. The ILG Guide now simply provides members with a construct for how to operationalize an effective program and overcome these barriers. By leveraging the guide, program leaders can clearly see the sixteen processes to coalesce Legal, RIM, Business, Privacy and IT processes to lower cost and risk. The impacts to the enterprise (and resulting costs) are high when legal, records and IT don't work in concert, and the cost of doing nothing is even higher.  Organizations can improve information economics by operationalizing their information lifecycle governance program using this guide, resulting in significant cost savings and reduced risk going forward.  We are excited to be able to provide such a guide to our member organizations.

Thanks, Deidre, for participating in the interview!

And to the readers, as always, 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 Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

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