Preparing for Social Media Collection and Preservation in e-Discovery

Recently the eDJ Group, a leading e-Discovery research and analyst firm released a report about social media as it relates to legal discovery. In it, they make it very clear to companies of all sizes that there’s no excuse for not managing and preserving social media content for compliance and litigation purposes.

Keeping Up with Social Media

Seven years after social media became mainstream, more and more businesses have adopted, embraced or otherwise accepted its presence into their marketing strategies. But many more companies haven’t begun to address it as part of a holistic e-Discovery strategy.

For some, they waited to see how others addressed it; for others, social media was a fad that didn’t warrant additional concern. However, as social media has become an accepted marketing and customer service channel, organizations are struggling to get caught up thanks to regulatory standards put into place by FINRA and the SEC.

Elements of a Social Media Governance Policy

There are many ways companies can effectively integrate social media governance policies. Previously we’ve outlined 9 Steps to Developing a Repeatable Social Media Litigation Readiness Plan. In the eDJ Group report, they encourage companies to be specific when designing their policy. It’s simply not enough to advise employees not to post company information on social media sites; rather it’s more important to outline particular types of information that cannot be shared or posted, like trade secrets, earning reports and other sensitive and proprietary information.

The report also recommends including the following elements in your organization’s social media policy:

• Guidance on acceptable use of company social media profiles for personal reasons
• Clear rules on whether and how employees can use company intellectual property in personal usage of social media
• Prohibition of disclosure of confidential information
• Ramifications for policy violations

There's No Such Thing as Privacy

While having a social media policy tailored specifically for your organization, its employees and socially acceptable behaviors is important, it’s also necessary to understand the legal implications of the privacy expectations of the major social media networks. The report cautions that many of these sites have “crafted policies in such a way as to allow discovery of information to happen should law enforcement or the Courts require.”

The report outlines the policies of some of the major social media publishers as they relate to eDiscovery:

What does this mean exactly for your organization? It means that information is not as private as users might think it is and it can be much easier to collect as well. It means that if a company does not proactively retain social media content, it can still be accessible.

Define, Collect, & Preserve

Ultimately, the report serves to remind us that there is much more to social media than sharing of information. The preservation of information shared is also a key component that companies must also prepare for. Much like anything for which a company must develop a strategy, it’s critical to define requirements based on what’s relevant to its culture and the regulatory standards of the industry. In order to determine what method to use for social media collection and preservation, companies must first answer several questions so as to define requirements, such as: 

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Forrester Business Process & Architecture Forum Focuses on Digital Disruption #ForrForum

At its 2012 Business Process & Architecture Forum, which will be held October 18-19 in Orlando, FL, Forrester Research is focusing squarely on effectively managing digital disruption in the enterprise. In an interview with CMSWire, Forrester Research Director Steve Powers explained the philosophy on digital disruption attendees can expect to learn about.

Customer Experience Evolution Creates Disruption

“We’re seeing the whole idea of customer experience changing very quickly,” said Powers. “There is a customer inflection point where the customer will either continue to work with you or try someone else. Customer experience is a huge factor in influencing the outcome of that inflection point.”

Powers said the rapid evolution of multichannel and cross-channel customer interaction, as well as increased expectations for personalized service, present a serious technological challenge. “Traditional IT teams can’t keep up,” he said.

Agile Response Combats Disruption

As a result, Powers said marketing teams often outsource or subsource their technology needs.

“What do you, as an IT department, have to do to get marketing to work with you and not around you?” he asked.

The answer, according to Powers, is a dismantling of the traditional silos separating IT and marketing. He gave the example of one Forrester client who embedded the IT and marketing departments into a “digital experience group." This got IT involved in developing marketing tools during the initial design process, instead of serving as a “black box” at the end of the project. He also mentioned that some companies maintain a traditional IT department but divide it into a front office group responsible for designing and delivering customer experience, and a back office group responsible for functions such as ERP and HR.

Powers also advised companies to consider a best-of-breed approach when implementing customer experience technologies — but cautioned against using too many different point solutions. “No one vendor can provide all the right components,” he said. “You should use solution sets from different vendors and see how to tie them together.”

For example, Powers said an organization might use marketing automation and testing/optimization tools from one vendor and then integrate them with e-commerce and analytics tools from another.

Key Sessions on 'Disrupting' Disruption

Several key sessions during the Forrester conference will focus specifically on how companies can disrupt disruption, so to speak, by using technology and business process to turn digital customer experience trends to their advantage. They include:

• Thursday, Oct. 18, 8:45-9:15 AM - The Disruptor's Handbook: How To Make The Most Of Digital Disruption: This keynote from James L. McQuivey, Ph.D., Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research will help attendees understand the transformative effect of digitally empowered customers, assess their company's readiness for digital disruption internally and externally, and adopt the skills and policies that accelerate their organization's embrace of digital disruption.
• Thursday, Oct. 18, 11:25 AM - 12:10 PM - Implementing The Different In The Age of Digital Disruption: Craig Le Clair, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research will explain how to make the shift from analog to digital business processes and use mobile as a catalyst for driving digital process transformation.
• Thursday, Oct. 18, 4:05 PM - 04:35 PM - Don’t Let Digital Disruption Cause Information Corruption: Michele Goetz, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research will discuss a framework for data quality to ensure that customers can rely on the information they use on any device from laptops to mobile.
• Friday, Oct. 19, 1:15 – 1:45 PM – Innovating for Disruption: Nigel Fenwick, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research will explain how business architecture can help integrate innovation into existing planning processes.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

How To: Adding Depth to User Experience (UX) with Generalists and Hybrids

In Part 1 of this "UX How To" article I explained the families of roles within the user experience discipline; UX Specialists, UX Generalists and Hybrids. The Specialists, from research, strategy, design and front-end development, were covered in detail. Generalists and Hybrids float above and in-between. If UX is a discipline of science and art, Generalists are those who harness the talent within a business context. Hybrids are those who create possibility by successfully merging two thought patterns into one.

Floating Above - UX Generalists

Many of my close colleagues (with whom I studied and practiced) have dramatically influenced me as we navigated together into a view of humanizing business. I would hope that the influence was mutual in this journey towards the business strategy and model of applying the humanities to enterprises..

UX Generalists are typically referred to as producers or directors and their duties, like their titles, vary widely from shop to shop. Project managers sometimes take the place of the generalist, but can quickly lose their footing if a project veers outside of interactive design and development. Very few project managers understand the nuances of the UX roles and how the activities performed and deliverables created by each role weave together to ultimately deliver a high-quality, business-grounded experience.

The best generalists are like conductors of the symphony. This unique ability is highlighted both in Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind and in the 10 Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley. One of the most overlooked capabilities of generalists is that their ability to abstract does not end at the boundary of their discipline. The very same skill that helps them weave different UX roles, activities and deliverables also helps to make projects profitable and beneficial for both the client and the team alike.

The Inbetweeners - Hybrids

A close colleagues once said to me that he did not want his UX architects doing development work for solutions. Even if they had the skills to do so, he did not want to start a process where their design work would be biased by what was easier to implement rather than what was the most efficacious for the intended users. I understood his concern then, and I still do today, but I have a different perspective. While it is true that some practitioners can be tainted by what they know of the possible, it is also true that they can be uplifted and inspired by it as well.

Students of popular music already know a basic fact: genius emerges from practitioners who figure out a way to fuse multiple genres together. A beautiful illustration of this, pictured below, was created by Reebee Garofalo and is included in Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations. The Computational Media program at Georgia Tech is one of a new breed of university programs where students who want to fuse art and technology together can get  their creative-geek on. Daniel Chase Hooper, a recent graduate of the program, has shown the promise of the Hybrid that I am referring to.

Using skills from several disciplines including (interaction designer, software engineer, marketing and video production), Daniel created a completely new way to edit text on the iPad and then posted a clever video on YouTube that ultimately helped him land a post-graduation job working as a developer at Apple.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Hobbs, New Mexico, Home Of A Failed $1 Billion Ghost Town, Conducts Another Grand Experiment

Lea County, New Mexico, shrugs off the loss of an investor's highly publicized tech-research city to focus on innovative energy programs, including algae, uranium enrichment, and one of the nation’s largest solar projects.

In the southeastern corner of New Mexico these days, a booming and diversifying energy industry has produced an enviably low unemployment rate. Which is why when someone mentions “the failed Pegasus project,” all it gets is a dismissive shrug by folks too busy to care.

Last month, Pegasus Global Holdings announced that it was pulling out of its commitment to invest $1 billion in a research ghost town outside Hobbs, New Mexico. Pegasus managing partner Robert Brumley tells FastCompany.com that the deal's collapse was largely due to difficulties in negotiations with a major landowner. (He says his company remains committed to building in New Mexico, however, and is leaning toward a site near Albuquerque.)

We’re too busy to pout or hold a grudge.

At first, community leaders were surprised, frustrated, and even a bit piqued. But those feelings dissipated rapidly, according to Lea County Commission chairman Gregg Fulfer.

“Frankly, with unemployment hovering around 4% (the national rate is stuck at 8.3%) and our economy humming along quite nicely, we’re too busy to pout or hold a grudge,” he says.

Fulfer is a 51-year-old Lea County native who works in the oil and gas industry and has seen the region go through numerous boom and bust cycles. But today, he says, the county is humming on “all cylinders,” thanks to high oil prices (currently around $96 a barrel), heavy investment in natural gas production, and diversification into wind, nuclear, solar, and biofuels, in addition to industries outside of energy.

Presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney even visited Hobbs on Thursday to promote his energy plans. Speaking in the parking lot of Watson Truck & Supply--an oilfield business started in 1943-- he promised to speed up drilling on federal lands by turning over the permitting process to states.

A rendering of a section of Pegasus's $1 billion research ghost town

Officials say the county is being chosen for new and innovative energy projects because of a combination of factors including: available flat and arid land; a skilled workforce; training programs; few worries about natural disasters like hurricanes or floods; state and local tax incentives; and a pro-business attitude that welcomes companies of all kinds.

Because of the region's energy diversification, the most recent drop in oil prices (down to $45 a barrel five years ago) did not hit the county as hard as past declines, Fulfer says. Another drop, in the '90s, saw prices fall to $15 a barrel, forcing some residents to leave the county.

“Urenco U.S.A., our nuclear enrichment plant, is going great guns, with plans to build a $1 billion addition to its existing facility,” he says, adding that other areas of the country weren't receptive to an enrichment plant--and a few communities even held protests--but Lea County's energy titans ultimately felt that enrichment was one of the safer fields to be in. “So while the Pegasus project would have been nice, we’re not desperate by any means," Fulfer says. "We’ve got other major developments in the works, too."

Lisa Hardison, president and CEO of the Lea County Economic Development Corp., says her agency has pushed hard to expand the county’s economy beyond oil and gas in recent years with its EnergyPlex brand, welcoming all types of energy development, from algae, wind, and solar to uranium enrichment.

“That’s one of the reasons why Pegasus would have been a good fit with its research efforts and high-quality jobs, because research often means manufacturing,” she says. “But they’ve moved on and so have we because we have so many other positive things in the pipeline.”

The county is also part of one of the nation’s largest solar projects in Sun Edison’s 54-megawatt effort, which is expected to generate more than 2 million megawatt hours of clean, renewable energy over 20 years to power more than 192,000 average U.S. homes annually.

In addition, last year, Massachusetts-based Joule Unlimited leased 1,200 acres--with the potential to scale up to 5,000 acres--for the production of renewable biodiesel and ethanol directly from sunlight, bacteria, and waste CO2. The company recently built a 40-acre pilot plant and is slated to start production in September.

And another firm, El Dorado Biofuels, is using recycled water from oil-and-gas production in four ponds to produce algae that could be used to generate energy or sold as livestock feed. Two others, International Isotopes and Intercontinental Potash, have plans to build plants for processing fluorine gas and fertilizer, respectively.

Brenda Brooks, the community affairs director for Urenco, says her company was recruited to Lea County in 2003, started production in 2010, and now has 350 employees working to enrich enough uranium to supply a dozen large nuclear power plants annually. The company also has 700 construction and contract workers building its new facility.

Halliburton has been here in a big way. It's using our oil and gas training ground as we speak.

Brooks, a Hobbs native who worked in the oil industry in Texas, says it was the “tremendous community support” that led to Urenco’s selection of Lea County as the site for its plant.

“We were recruited here,” she says, praising efforts by the local community college to help train technicians for the enrichment facility. Workers from outside the area were also recruited, she adds.

Steve McCleery, president of New Mexico Junior College in Hobbs and a 30-year resident of Lea County, says companies do training on campus every day--and not just Urenco.

“They aren’t looking for degrees or college hours,” he says. “Halliburton, for example, has been here in a big way for the last year and is using our oil and gas training ground as we speak.”

He goes on: “New companies are walking in every day and we’re just trying to keep up and create packages that meet their needs.”

The Pegasus project would have been a boon to the county by “creating wealth through research,” he says. “But they made a business decision and I have to respect that.”

Meanwhile, his college and southeastern New Mexico are doing just fine, he says: “Right now, if anything, we have a housing shortage and companies can’t find employees, so it’s not the end of the world from an economic-development standpoint. I’ve been through a lot of cycles, but I think things have changed somewhat with our diversification. That’s been a godsend to Lea County, but the multibillion-dollar oil-and-gas industry is still what drives our economy.”

For more information on Lea County, see edclc.org.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

IBM May Be Interested in RIM's Enterprise Business

Both Reuters and Bloomberg report that IBM is considering a bid for the enterprise division of Research in Motion (RIM). Is it true?

RIM's Enterprise Business

According to Bloomberg, citing two unnamed sources, IBM has made an informal approach to RIM to buy out the enterprise business that currently runs the servers RIM uses to support BlackBerrry email and messaging services.

While the Bloomberg report adds that no formal talks are underway at the moment, it does say that a review of operations instigated by the new CEO Thorsten Heins, and to be carried out by a bunch of bankers, could see it selling parts of it technology portfolio, or entering into technology partnerships where beneficial.

Also of note is that Bloomberg has also said that the same sources say that so far on one has come forward to buy the phone business, or the company, for that matter.

RIM's Steep Downturn

Incredible though it may seem, it wasn’t Apple, or even Google with Android that invented mobile email; it was RIM with BlackBerrry.

However, it is struggling as both Android and iOS now dominate the market.

RIM's share of the global smartphone market fell to 4.8 percent in the second quarter of this year from 12 percent a year earlier as Android climbed to 68 percent and Apple slipped to 17 percent, according to research firm IDC.

The result, Bloomberg says, is that  that over the last year, RIM has lost 70% of its market capitalization.

RIM Sells NewBay

Also a possibility in this review could be the sale of NewBay, the Irish-based company that RIM paid US$ 100 million for in 2011.

The move was seen at the time as a late, but timely, move by RIM into cloud services. NewBay should have fit in nicely with RIM, providing video and social networking tools for smartphones (and computers) and was seen as a key to shoring up RIM’s failing fortunes.

When RIM bought it in October of that year NewBay had over 80 million subscribers and could deliver any media stored on its services to any mobile device.

The thinking was that with NewBay, RIM would create a new business segment and boost its offerings, not to mention revenues.The proposed sale would also fit in with the sale earlier in the year of Alt-N Technologies the email services provider, which it acquired in 2009.

Instead, it seems now that Heins is focusing on delivering new range of devices that will run on RIM’s BB10 operating system, in the first quarter of 2013.

IBM Plus RIM Services?

As to what IBM might get out of it, it is hard to gauge at the moment and can’t be gauged until such a point as a deal is reached and the terms have been released.

However, the enterprise business would enable IBM to add mobile services to its already extensive service offerings to large enterprises. It could also add a substantial boost to its Global Services group that pulls in half of the company’s total revenue.

And then IBM is also one of the few companies that could actually afford the price tag, which has been estimated to be worth between US$ 1.5 billion and US$ 2.5 billion, depending on who you talk to.

In addition to this, IBM is still buying all around it; since the beginning of this year it has already closed five acquisitions and still has a very deep war chest for other acquisitions.

It is not clear when a decision, if any, on this deal will be announced, or confirmed, and both companies have denied there's anything going on at all.

But as soon as something happens, we’ll let you know.

 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com