Research Shows Web Governance is Necessary!

At Vamosa, we’ve recently commissioned research to look into enterprises’ web governance policy. The results were not good. Over one third of enterprises have no web governance policy or inconsistent policies on legal and technical compliance for web content. The research also showed that 4% of enterprises never check content for legal compliance. Basically, there are a lot of enterprises out there that are completely open to eDiscovery cost implications or other legal issues.

And the costs are real. The US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), eDiscovery laws, force companies in litigation to present a whole array of electronic evidence data to lawyers, from email to instant messaging chats and accounting databases. Yet companies are struggling to do this – and are paying hefty fines as a result. 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. Enterprises are not encouraging proper governance of content and as a result are putting themselves at risk.

Having said all this, legal compliance and the fear of litigation in case of compliance failure is driving the growth of the ECoG market. This is a good thing as more enterprises need control over their web content and effective ECoG will make it a reality.  ECoG will help enterprises not only achieve, but maintain good content quality to satisfy these key business challenges that are reliant on content.

Check out more on this in our white paper ‘Time to Make Content a Board-Level Issue’.