Rolling the dice with predictive coding leveraging analytics technology for information governance.

• Author: Issacs, Leigh

With increasing frequency, organizations are realizing the importance, value, and benefits of implementing an information governance program. Information continues to proliferate at an insanely rapid pace, and the combination of legacy unmanaged information and the plethora of new information that is being generated in mountainous volumes becomes overwhelming.

New types of vehicles and repositories that deliver and store information are also increasing exponentially. Structured and unstructured data are found stored in archives, e-mails, hard drives, and other data repositories, resulting in significant pockets of information that are difficult to access and search. The financial, productivity, and time costs of maintaining storage systems for so much data are prohibitive.

To complicate matters, it is difficult to gain a clear picture of what this data contains, posing significant business risks and adding to the time and expense of discovery or investigation exercises. As such, it is imperative that organizations act on better identifying and reducing their volumes of data.

The data growth projections and statistics are staggering. Recent estimates by analysts and research indicate that:

* Each year 1,200 exabytes of new data will be generated, according to the IDC Report "Business Strategy: Business Analytics and Big Data--Driving Government Businesses."

* Enterprises will experience 650% data growth in the next five years, says David Rosenbaum in his report "That New Big Data Magic" on cfo.com.

* 80% of this data will be unstructured and generated from a variety of sources, such as blogs, web content, and e-mail, states Adrian Bridgewater in a report on CWDN: The Computer Weekly Application Developer Network.

* 70% of this data is stale after 90 days, notes Big Data Bytes in "90% of Everything Is Crud."

At a glance, these statistics make it clear that information governance challenges will continue to grow as organizations attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff to determine what is useful versus what is not and what information exists beyond its usefulness or identified retention requirement.

At the same time organizations are struggling to find the magic wand to conquer their information governance woes, technologies are emerging to address large volumes of electronically stored information (ESI) for purposes of e-discovery. Organizations should consider whether it is possible to leverage these tools for identifying, managing, and appropriately governing their information.

Technologies for Tackling IG Challenges

When used innovatively, the solutions used during e-discovery and litigation to avoid cost and time to address legal hold, data collection, data processing, and document review can also be expanded to add value into other areas, such as information storage, records retention, and data security.

Predictive coding, which is an evolving technology that combines people, technology, and workflows to find key documents and identify and...