Legal obligations are one of the main motivations for in­stalling an efficient content management system.  

It is clear that a smart content management system is a valuable and ever more essential enterprise re­source. But for many organisations which have not so far invested in joining up their data the threat of a discovery order from a court or regu­latory body is potentially a major dri­ver. The sheer scale of effort and costs in complying are daunting to even the largest organisations, which are in fact the most likely to be compelled to discover and disclose.

 Whether it is about financial mis­deeds, socially unacceptable behavior in the workplace or a regulatory compliance issue, the task of combing through all of an organisation's re­cords is daunting. In the state sector, a Freedom of Information request can be equally challenging, with perhaps apocryphal tales of five or six fairly senior civil servants involved full-time for days or even weeks.

 The salient point is that without a content management system the or­ganisation's data will not have been structured in anticipation of any such search. Best case scenario might be an open-ended draw on man-hours to conduct the discovery. Worse case could be inspectors sent in by an exex­ternal authority or having  to hire re­searchers from its legal or other advisers. In any event, it is likely to be a serious expense.

 "We have known cases where an organisation has delivered data of the order of ten terabytes to its solicitors in order to comply with a court order,"said Pat Farrelly, managing di­rector of Dublin document management specialists Digiscan. The e-discovery challenge then is to emulate the power of a content man­agement system which does not actu­ally exist.

 "But there really is a magic bullet." he said "Zylabs eDiscovery software has been successfully used by large corporations and investigative agen­cies for well over a decade. It complies with the globally-recognised Electro­nic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) to comprehensively search heterogeneous data stores for eviden­tial or other relevant material. Equally important, it is accepted as proof that the search has been com­plete."

 This is an effective and economical solution, Farrelly said. "Typically we are called in to install Zylab and con­duct the immediately required e-discovery. Invariably, when the immediate job is done the client wants it left in place. It then becomes the content management solution and ensures readiness for proof of compli­ance or litigation in the future."

 In response to client requests, Di­giscan provides an outsourced service in this area. "Demand for the bureau service has principally involved inter­nal matters," Farrelly said. "Manage­ment may discover some problem which needs to be immediately con­tained and then the extent of it un­covered. It might be a HR issue or something more serious, so emails and individual file stores will have to be searched.

 "In any such case, the organisation has an immediate need for an e-dis­covery tool to search comprehen­sively through the content of all its data. Only then can it make the ap­propriate management decisions"