Enterprise Content Governance – The next conversation for the Board

You may have noticed we’ve been mentioning Enterprise Content Governance. But if you haven’t noticed, Enterprise Content Governance is the act of ensuring your content is structured and controlled so that it enables the business to minimize Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), reduce exposure to compliance risk, maximize worker productivity and protect the organization’s key knowledge assets. Simply put, ECoG is the process of not only achieving, but maintaining good content quality.

In 2008, failure to comply with FRCP data discovery demands in litigation cost financial services firm UBS Warburg $29 million. Pharmaceutical company Merck, meanwhile, was forced to hand over an astounding $253 million for the same reasons. In fact, a well-known international fast food company allegedly spends $100,000 dollars in fines every day because it cannot respond with the right information in time. These costs are real, and extremely damaging.

We’ve all heard the horror stories about businesses getting fined massively for not being able to find content, whether it’s structured or unstructured. As board members are increasingly held responsible for the content and IT systems in place, e-Discovery (or eDisclosure) is now absolutely a board level conversation. And this is where Enterprise Content Governance plays a vital role.

With increasing varieties of content being used as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case, multi-national enterprises should prepare themselves for potential e-discovery requests. Yet according to Forrester, two-thirds of businesses consider their e-discovery strategy reactive rather than proactive.

A reactive approach won’t sit well with the courts. To comply with discovery of electronic records you must produce records in a timely manner, not something done easily reactively. With ever growing volumes of content, e-discovery can be time-consuming and expensive if you’re not prepared.

Enterprises need to be ‘litigation ready’ and the board needs to be instigating that conversation. By utilizing ECoG offerings, large businesses and Governments worldwide can implement content management and compliance policies within an infrastructure of best practice methods – optimizing corporate knowledge, whilst reducing company exposure to legislative risk.

To learn more about how ECoG should be a board level conversation in readiness for e-Discovery, check out our recently launched whitepaper ‘Time to make content a board-level issue.’ Download