The Battle to Tame Unstructured Data - ' The Ethics of Data '
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The Ethics of Data
Another driver of dealing with unstructured data is the ever-increasing burden of regulatory compliance. Aungate, a division of Autonomy, is specifically designed to help companies identify employees who may be breaking the law, or at least company policy. Its technology analyzes vast quantities of unstructured data such as e-mail and PowerPoint slides, and looks for exceptions——for users who are doing something outside the norm.
"Ninety percent of information is irrelevant, but that other 2 percent could put you out of business," says Ian Black, managing director of Aungate. One of his company's clients, ABN AMRO Holding N.V. banking group, which has 3,000 branches in more than 60 countries, uses Aungate technology to analyze communications in real time. "They watch for internal messages and check them for compliance," says Egan.
The technology first analyzes a group of e-mails that have been identified as problematic—say, investment bankers who are passing insider information to their equity counterparts. Through sophisticated pattern recognition, it then compares new e-mails to this original group and flags those that are suspicious.
The technology is also being used to comply with requests from federal and state agencies. CIOs, after all, don't want to find themselves in the crosshairs of Uncle Sam. Some companies think that the best defense is a lack of evidence, and so will try to erase historical data at regular intervals. But experts warn that the opposite approach is actually more effective.
Many unstructured-data experts well remember last year's $1.4 billion judgment against Morgan Stanley for acting illegally in the 1998 sale of Ron Perelman's Coleman Co. camping-gear company to Sunbeam Corp. Some claim the judgment was a direct result of the defense's inability to produce relevant e-mails and documents the court demanded. As one analyst noted, "During the pretrial discovery process, and the trial itself, Morgan Stanley kept stumbling on old, hard-to-search backup tapes and couldn't perform effective searches on its newer e-mail archive." Eventually, the judge became so frustrated with the delay that she ruled against Morgan Stanley.
When the government comes looking for information, CIOs will be "forced to deal" with unstructured data, says Brian Babineau, a research analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group in Palo Alto, Calif.
Story Guide:
The Battle to Tame Unstructured Data
The Search For Meaning
Search Engines for Search Engines
The Ethics of Data
The Enterprise Approach?
Sidebar: The Data Revolution Will Be Televised
Next page: The Enterprise Approach?
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