OC CIO Roundtable Minutes 9-10-09

1993-2009
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
September 10, 2009 meeting

Present: Mitch Morris, Jim Sutter, Jennifer Curlee, Jeff Reid, Jeff Hecht, Tina Haines, Subbu Murthy, Sean Brown, Sharon Solomon, Dave Phillips

The minutes of this and prior breakfasts are available online at the Peer Consulting Group’s website, www.peergroup.net, with links to the presentation material, when available.

We are looking for volunteers to introduce the following topics, starting in January:
IT alignment with the CEO/business
IT Governance
Web 2.0/Web 3.0
On-demand computing
Go Green with ?
Service Catalog
CIO longevity (or lack thereof)

Topic: e-Discovery – Data retention and other related topics

Mitch Morris, IAPMO, started this very interactive discussion by stating that document retention means many things to many people, depending on rules and practices defined by their industry or as part of the definitions contained in SOX, HIPPA, and COBRA. If you are not mandated by federal or state law, it is very important to define your own policy, which will make e-discovery much more efficient. In this way, you can define how long to keep ”old” data, reduce the amount and governance of data you need to store for all types of storage devices (hard disks, servers, mobile devices, e-mail, tapes, off-site storage, etc.). e-Discovery deals with discovery in civil litigation of electronic stored information (ESI), which is very different from paper because of volume, transience, persistence and the metadata, which usually accompanies the data. This was the subject of 2 amendments to rules 16 and 26 of Federal Rules of Civil Procedures, 12/1/06 – please refer to Mitch’s handout for the precise definitions. Responding to an attorney’s broad request for data (a data witch hunt) can have serious financial, time and resources impacts. The best advice is anticipate the possibility and work with your legal department to define a response process. Do not to respond directly to the requesting attorney but work through your own legal department to narrow down the data requested, and the time frame for developing an estimate and doing the work. The members present had a variety of experiences with trying to be responsive to requests for information, on the one hand, and not overwhelming the IT organization on the other hand. There is also a confidentiality aspect to this subject so we will not identify the precise organization and experience. Most organizations have had some experience with trying to respond to request for e-discovery. One organization had 2 e-discovery legal actions, and so they had to define the search parameters and the financial impact before responding to the request. They now have 1 person in IT as their litigation point of contact. They also have purchased a device to archive all their email. Another organization makes sure that their response policy is contained in all the contracts with their outsourcers. Mitch mentioned the Sedona Conference, which is an annual conference set up to define legal and operational guidelines for responding to such requests. He included a 2-page summary of the best practices, recommendations and principles addressing electronic document production – it lists the top 14 best practices. Fundamentally, lawyers don’t fully understand IT yet, nor the impact of their requests on IT. It is important for your company to have a data retention policy.

Thanks again to Mitch for an informative handout and for the interactive discussion.

Mitch Morris' handout is at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio .
.