3 Ways to Simplify E-Discovery Across the Extended Enterprise

When you think about the challenges to developing a simplified e-discovery process, what comes to mind? Chances are, a handful of words stand out—words like “cost,” “time,” and “risk,” to name a few.
 

However, those are also words you can use to describe an e-discovery process that hasn’t totally matured yet. Without a simplified e-discovery process that’s efficient across all your business functions, there’s a good chance you’re spending more money and time than you’d like, and potentially putting your organization at a greater risk than is necessary.

Let’s take a look at three ways you can simplify your organization’s e-discovery process across all of your business units.

1. Standardize where content lives. There are a lot of different ways to store data these days. With each new technology tool your business utilizes, there’s an increasing possibility that data becomes housed in the “dark corners” of your organization that only a few people know about. This can include personal locations that only an individual employee may know about, making it exponentially more difficult to know when data is being saved in places where it doesn’t belong. And that’s not to mention the potential risk that is incurred by doing so.
2. Centralize your e-discovery activities in one system. You’ll probably never have a single repository for every piece of data you preserve/collect for e-discovery purposes. But placing as many files as possible into one centralized system can help streamline your preservation and collection practices because it’s a lot easier to track down data—and a lot less risky—when it’s housed in fewer locations. Migrating all of your data to a single e-discovery software platform will help you easily apply retention policies and defensibly delete data once it’s met its use.
3. Extend discovery across your entire enterprise. The first two tips here are a way to help standardize what the collection process looks like across your organization. Put simply, you must be able to collect important data and content across your entire, extended enterprise and your external users. It is critical to know who has access to it, where it resides, and to have control over who is reviewing and accessing it. Leverage that functionality through tools like e-discovery software to more effectively manage your data: it drives down costs when you have an understanding of where your data resides, how it’s collected, and how it’s being preserved.

As data-related activities continue to make waves through the creation of regulations and litigation, maintaining a healthy data-management process at your business is only going to become even more important. Thankfully, you can utilize your existing e-discovery software as a solution to many of these business challenges.

For more tips about how you can apply the functions of e-discovery tools across your entire organization, take a look at our infographic on re-purposing processes to meet data privacy requirements.