Jeff Miller's Big Idea Creativity seeking form

Today's legal environment is very complex. Attorneys are faced with myriad challenges to effectively and efficiently support the digital demands associated with a growing number of cases. Many of these challenges are created by the rapidly advancing technologies in both the corporate and social spheres. When the focus is electronic discovery, the technologies that create these challenges. . . .

This article discusses the importance of viewing in an e-discovery solution and focuses on the five keys for selecting the viewer that meets your e-discovery requirements. Viewing is one of the pillars of an effective e-discovery solution and can be either a pre-integrated viewer, as part of the enterprise content management platform, or a separate use case-based process-oriented solution. . . .

If in-house e-discovery is so great, why are some people still talking about it instead of just doing it? Bringing more of the e-discovery process in-house truly is not for everyone-but probably not for the reasons that you think. Let's review some of the most common objections so that we can better understand them and determine whether those roadblocks are real or artificial. . . .

E-discovery is the identification, gathering, culling, analysis and legal review of data (e.g., electronic documents, communications, database records and systems transaction logs) related to an actual or anticipated legal matter. E-discovery touches important data-related organizational areas such as IT, information governance, compliance, email and records management, legal hold and information access. . . .

E-discovery used to be the province of the enterprise but that is changing, and it is changing fast. Litigation, regulatory compliance, external and internal investigations are moving into the mid-tier of organizations with a few hundred to a few thousand employees. All of these processes require e-discovery collections on user data including email, files and SharePoint. . . .

All-in-one or best-in-breed? A single software suite or a number of point solutions unified together to operate as a cohesive solution? These two questions have been hotly debated in the e-discovery tech industry for years. E-discovery has many steps, and each step requires software in order to execute. As each part of the process is conducted, the individual pieces of information flow. . . .

I approach the monthly pleasure of writing these articles with an exotic blend of awe and dread. Dread, due mostly to the fear that I cannot possibly find anything worthwhile to say to you readers that can measurably improve your (a.) life; (b.) job or (c.) hairstyle. (I made that last one up; there always has to be three things. Just ask Rick Perry.) The awe factor usually comes when I find out about halfway through that I am utterly wrong...

Concept-based advanced analytics isn't anything new, and many of the technologies incorporating conceptual analytics are very mature. Numerous case studies illustrate how these technologies help manage costs, trim schedules and increase quality throughout the e-discovery process. Justices, too, are pressing attorneys to use advanced techniques to avoid keyword pitfalls. . . .

The e-discovery frenzy that has gripped the American legal system over the past decade has become increasingly expensive. Particularly costly to organizations is the process of preserving and collecting documents. These aspects of discovery are often lengthy and can be disruptive to business operations. Just as troubling, they increase the duration and expense of litigation. . . .

In the face of a turbulent economy and increasing competition, optimizing the process by which you engage new customers has become paramount. Improving this process?often referred to as new account opening (NAO) or customer on-boarding?can help to ensure customer satisfaction and increase the revenue that flows from high customer retention. Getting the process wrong can have dramatic negative consequences. Consider this example: A global currency exchange trading firm experiencing exponential growth found it difficult to streamline the NAO process because of several business and technology impediments. Manual processes that involved multiple databases were struggling to handle increased volumes, resulting in system downtime, poor productivity and declining customer satisfaction. . . .

Enterprise mobility, cloud computing and social technologies are rapidly gaining momentum in the enterprise because they open new worlds of opportunity to transform operations and engage with customers. At the same time, strategic process improvement, reduced technology costs and better alignment of IT with business goals are all crucial in today's fiscal and competitive environments. By combining process improvement with native mobility, cloud delivery and social business collaboration, an advanced business process management (BPM) software platform drives new efficiencies and growth opportunities, increases profit margins and deepens customer loyalty. Smart enterprises are seeking a single platform from which enterprises can tap the power of mobile, cloud and social technologies. . . .

There are business processes, and then there are processes that mean business. Not all work activities are created equal.

Take me, for example. A work process for me is: Decide to write an article; worry about it; pace the floor, fret, stew and finally get it done at the last minute. Most of the time. Doesn't sound like much of a "process," does it? You'd think that after 30-odd years of doing this, it would get easier. Nope. But I try to keep in mind the advice my friend David Weinberger gave me once: "Crappiness is hard to detect, but lateness is apparent immediately" . . . .

Recent reports suggest that taxonomy management and auto-classification is one of the top five most popular third-party add-ons for SharePoint 2010. A part of any strategic decision to standardize on SharePoint 2010 is to take full advantage of the Term Store Management Tool?Microsoft's initial building block to enable organizations to natively build taxonomy structures and facilitate the management of large amounts of content?much of which is strategic or of high value to the organization. . . .

SharePoint is one of the fastest selling Microsoft products of all time. It's been around for less than a decade and the 2010 release was only the fourth. So, by any measure, Microsoft SharePoint's success has been off the charts. According to AIIM, two-thirds of its membership use SharePoint. Nor is it only analysts and industry groups that confirm SharePoint's rapid acceptance. SharePoint's viral spread. . . .

SharePoint (SP) provides for collaboration, document management, workflow, business intelligence and more. With this range of capabilities, CIOs must determine which components to deploy and how to do so. Most critically, CIOs must decide whether SP is just a team tool or part of a larger enterprise content management (ECM) strategy with the implications of cross-organization findability, policy compliance and governance. . . .

Today, information has two aspects: On one hand, it is the basis for most business processes and can create a decisive competitive advantage. On the other hand, the sheer volume and complexity of business information and its tendency to get lost within large organizations can put the brakes on productivity, waste resources and overtax the IT staffs deployed to support the relevant systems. So, before being overrun by information, organizations should develop. . . .

Are you thinking about deploying SharePoint in your organization? You won't have to do much research before you come across the big "G" word?governance. Just the word itself is somewhat imposing and definitions for it will vary. In fact, if you ask three different experts what governance means, you're likely to get four different answers. And while I have yet to find the one perfect definition of governance, I can accept this one. . . .

My trip up the learning curve for SharePoint is practically Sisyphean. Every time I think I've got my head wrapped around it, I find out... not quite, buster. Not the using of SharePoint?that's easy as pie. It's everything else that my former boss would have called "the surround stuff". . . .

Social computing has fundamentally changed the way people share and consume information?ultimately boosting productivity and innovation. Through the use of Microsoft SharePoint and social technologies, business conversations are now occurring in transparent work streams, enabling connections and dialogues to happen more expediently?and in some cases to occur under serendipitous circumstances that might never have occurred. . . .