BEYOND DISCOVERY
Deploying a search product is often a tactical response to an e-discovery emergency. But there are long-term strategic benefits to these products that involve understanding and managing corporate information, particularly unstructured data.

In addition to discovery, CVR's Brooks uses Idol to index work orders that are generated as part of plant maintenance operations. While these work orders contain pre-defined codes that identify common operations, employees also include detailed comments about problems and solutions that provide context about maintenance issues that can't be gleaned from codes.

"When Idol goes through the data, it groups together like topics, so when I'm running through a set of work orders, I can look at what the issues have been," Brooks says. If he sees large clusters of work orders around a specific topic, it allows him to identify reoccurring problems.

IT search also can shine a light into hidden corners of an organization, such as laptops and desktops. IT often has little visibility into the kinds of information stored there. Popular repositories such as SharePoint, which can be deployed without IT's input or even awareness, also are prime candidates for compliance search. "We see people running our technology once a week for audits, like finding personally identifiable information, source code, intellectual property," says John Patzakis, chief strategy officer at Guidance. Kazeon CEO Sudhakar Muddu says 50% of his company's business is e-discovery, with the rest in support of governance, security, and data management.

This process of looking at search and indexing to serve e-discovery needs also can help companies manage--or create--a retention and disposition strategy. "Forward-looking companies are being driven by chief risk officers to get a handle on data," says Craig Carpenter, general counsel and VP of marketing for Recommind. "They want to have it organized and start retiring data they don't need." Getting rid of data may go against the natural instincts of technology profesionals, but as organizations add terabytes of information to the infrastructure every year, those instincts may be swamped by necessity.

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