DiscoveryMining

On a flight back from L.A. last week I was reading the Economist, which I try to do regularly. In the March 22nd issue there was mention of social networks. The substance of two articles, “Everywhere and Nowhere” and “Break Down These Walls“, covered the rise of the ‘walled gardens’ we once had with AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. As the Internet matured and opened up, the question became why would anyone live in just AOL, a proprietary platform, when there was a whole WWW out there to explore? Over the years the world realized, mostly through the launch of Netscape, that open communication standards and data portability are long term winners.

So when I read Craig Ball’s article from Tuesday it got me thinking–are we propagating the mentality of web circa 1994? I would say Craig’s skepticism is expected. When I first learned about the EDRM XML project, I too had reservations. However, we do need something to help the data portability problem. But is this the right way to handle the portability issue? I have no idea and I don’t think this is actually the central issue. What is at stake is the ‘openness or lack of openness’ of our clients’ data to move from one system to another, and this is not a trivial issue. It can involve tremendous cost–not only price, but also time.

When a market matures standards tend to emerge. This pushes competition more towards increasing the value of their product offering, which is a good thing. This is exactly where the eDiscovery market is–ready for standards. We need to introduce a standard to the market; the first standard out may not be perfect, but it will push vendors to compete on value adding initiatives. We hear it all the time… “I’m having such a hard time with vendor x, but there’s nothing I can do. My data is being held hostage.” We do a big dis-service to our clients if we don’t offer a standard in terms of data portability.

As the social networks are proving, there is value in data portability. eDiscovery vendors need to conform to some basic standards so that we can then compete on our merits, and keep turning up the heat on innovation. Is XML the way? I’m not certain, but I’m willing to give it a try. After we investigate one area maybe we’ll uncover an even better approach–why not open up the web platforms to an API which allows anyone to write some code or move the data? Most of the work on the XML schema is working with text files. Any self respecting Perl programmer could quickly design and test to see how it works.

Implementing standards takes time and before one ’sticks’, there will be a few that fall down. I say let’s try. What do we have to lose? What we have to gain is increased innovation, and that’s good for everyone.

I’m sure we’ll be discussing this at Sedona, check me out on twitter later this week from the meeting.