Parity Research

Why Six Republican U.S. Senators are Right, and Wrong, about HITECH and EHR Interoperability

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Gary MacFadden

Healthcare System Players Interoperability
(By ITC Software)

U.S. Senators and healthcare information technology (HIT) make strange bedfellows indeed. To quote Trinculo, the jester in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “Alas the storm has come again! … Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows”. (Act 2, Scene 2)

In the wake of articles published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other major news outlets suggesting that electronic healthcare records (EHR) solutions are not living up to expectations, or worse, enabling fraud, (see Parity Research blog on the topic) a twenty seven page Whitepaper was published April 16^th, 2013 by Senate Republicans entitled REBOOT: Re-Examining the Strategies Needed to Successfully Adopt Healthcare IT.

Authored by six Republican U.S. Senators, none with any significant IT experience and only one with a healthcare background, the paper aims “to foster cooperation between all stakeholders – including providers, patients, EHR vendor companies, and the Department of Health and Human Services – to address the issues raised in this paper, evaluate the return on investment to date, and ensure this program is implemented wisely.” (page 5, paragraph 2)

Healthcare IT Tempest

The “program” in question is the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health or HITECH enacted under Title XIII of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The primary issue raised in the Senatorial paper is the lack of a “clear path toward interoperability” for electronic healthcare records (EHR) and the solutions that mange them within hospitals, across providers and even across state-run health information exchanges (HIE) – not to mention the billions spent on technology adoption.

The report, authored by Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Michael Enzi of Wyoming, Pat Roberts of Kansas and John Thune of South Dakota, decries the “misplaced focus on use of technology within silos rather than interoperability.” (page 11)

“Unfortunately, the program as laid out by CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) and the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) continues to focus less on the ability of disparate software systems to talk to one another and more on providing payments to facilities to purchase new technologies.

CMS’ failure to systematically and clearly address meaningful groundwork for interoperability at the start of the program could lead to costly obstacles that are potentially fatal to the success of the program.”

The Senators also address related concerns – what the paper refers to in separate chapters as “Lack of Oversight, Patient Privacy at Risk” and “Program Sustainability”. In part, they have concluded that while “clinical notes are recorded with increasing speed and ease, and other transformations offer the promise of increased efficiency, reduced costs, and improved quality of care… details of federal law and regulation may be inadvertently incentivizing unworkable, incoherent policy goals that ultimately make it difficult to achieve interoperability.” (page 27)

“Congress, the administration, and stakeholders must work together to ‘reboot’ the federal electronic health record incentive program in order to accomplish the goal of creating a system that allows seamless sharing of electronic health records in a manner that appropriately guards taxpayer dollars.”

The Senators assert that “transformations in health IT will significantly change how health care is provided in this country.” But until the program can be reexamined and evaluated – preferably through a detailed study conducted by an outside party – the Seantors are calling for a halt to spending “meaningful use” dollars set aside for providers to implement EHR solutions.

The Imperfect Storm

While the whitepaper brings up several valid points about lack of interoperability, potential misuse of funds and fraud, issues with security and long-term program viability, a lack of oversight and a rush to move smaller less well-funded providers through HIT adoption requirements to qualify for meaningful use, the paper fails to produce any viable suggestions to improve on what CMS and the ONC have so far put in place.

Halting the program to “recalibrate” (pages 1, 13) and conduct an in-depth study is not the answer – although that might make opponents of ObamaCare happy as the HITECH act is tied emotionally and essentially to the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

In addition, suggesting that HITECH and the ONC stick with their initial definition of interoperability is counter-productive. The paper quotes the ONC definition as “The establishment of standards that support the nationwide electronic exchange of health information (called “interoperability”) in a secure computer network.” (page 8, paragraph 3)

There are multiple dimensions to HIT interoperability and the healthcare ecosystem has to walk before it can run. To use an oil industry analogy, it makes no sense to focus all your efforts on the refinery when you haven’t yet figured out how to get the oil out of the ground. Lots of work needs to be done before a nationwide EHR standard can be implemented.

According to a recent survey conducted by Premier, which helps 2,000 hospitals across the country manage their back-office operations, “Thirty-two percent of respondents are unable to share data across the continuum of care.” (from Health Data Mgmt. article) Extrapolated across the 5,000 hospitals in the U.S., these findings would indicate that 1,600 hospitals can not effectively share EHR data between departments within their own organization. It is also highly likely that most of the remaining hospitals can only share a portion of their EHR data across the continuum of care.

Healthcare records come in many forms including handwritten on paper and a myriad of incompatible electronic formats. Top tier hospital groups with deep pockets have spent many millions bringing their historical EHRs on line and making them available to clinical and operational systems as well as newly implemented EHR solutions.

For the most part, these HIT leaders and innovators were motivated to make the interoperability investment within their own shops not because they were reacting to policy. On the contrary, they understood what the Senators’ whitepaper hints at: Interoperability helps improve quality of care and reduces cost.

Creating policy to achieve a nationwide EHR interoperability standard is doomed to failure. There are too many competing healthcare interests that influence policy including medical associations, technology vendors, payers, providers and big pharma. Better to establish interoperability guidelines and let the marketplace determine a de facto standard down the road.

The HIPAA privacy standard, while important and necessary, is hampering productivity and interoperability – at least the way it is so far being implemented. A recent survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute that focuses on productivity estimates that over $5 billion per year is lost due to the use of outmoded technology. The study also concludes the HIPAA regulations are an enabler.

At the same time, the less well-funded providers are struggling. Their IT departments are underfunded, understaffed and overworked, and they often use technologies that other industries, such as finance, replaced 15 to 20 years ago. There are several published reports indicating a severe shortage of healthcare IT personnel – which is no surprise since any highly qualified IT person can make more money and work with more advanced technology in many other industries.

Complexity + Chaos = $

As much as or more than any other industry, healthcare loves complexity and feeds off chaos. Healthcare is primarily reactive. Most people never see a doctor or seek medical attention unless they are already sick or experience a health-related crisis. Healthcare IT mimics this reactive condition. While ACA seeks to refocus both patients and providers on prevention and quality of care – which will ultimately lower costs – the prospect of less revenue in the healthcare pie may be anathema to providers, payers, big pharma, medical device manufactures, EHR solution providers and perhaps even some politicians.

Policies related to HITECH and the implementation of meaningful use are fueling the chaos by enforcing reactive behaviors from providers including the purchasing of mindbogglingly expensive EHR solutions. The push to implement EHR solutions is literally turning software entrepreneurs into billionaires such as the founder of Epic Systems – which last year found itself caught up in a potential lawsuit with rival Allscripts over a $303 million bid to supply New York City’s public hospitals with new EHR solutions.

As mentioned above, the Senators’ whitepaper refers to the suspected “Misuse of EHRs” which may facilitate “Code Creep” and “Actually increase health care costs”. (page 15) Two major points the articles written on the topic of EHR solutions abuse and the Senators’ whitepaper fail to point out are:

EHR solutions are glorified billing systems. That’s what they do best. It makes sense that they would optimize the medical billing process – a less-than-perfect science to begin with.
Fraud in the healthcare industry, including code creep, existed well before EHR solutions showed up. While EHR solutions might enable fraud, they also enable fraud detection.

Waiting on Interoperability Standards

The ONC’s Standards and Interoperability Framework, overseen by the Office of Interoperability and Standards has its work cut out for it. The framework gathers input from public and private sector sources aiming to build repeatable processes and best practices to help create standardized HIT specs. Simultaneously, a consortium of six EHR solution vendors, led by Allscripts and not including Epic, has created the CommonWell Health Alliance whose stated mission is to “provide a way for vendor systems to link and match patients and their healthcare data as they move from setting to setting, in a robust and seamless industry-wide data environment.”

While providers, and their patients, wait for all of these standards and the good intentions of software vendors to play out, meaningful use requirements are moving ahead. As stated by the Senators’ whitepaper, one of the biggest problems with meaningful use incentives is the absence of any interoperability accountability for EHR vendors. That needs to change.

Apparently there are no simple, cost-effective answers when it comes to healthcare IT and EHR interoperability. Or are there?

Achieving EHR Interoperability in Stages

Starting the interoperability exercise at the provider level where much of the critical unstructured patient data resides increases productivity and lowers costs related to managing and deriving value from health records and related documents while maintaining and improving compliance with HIPAA and meaningful use requirements.

Below are a few recommendations for policymakers and providers that can be achieved relatively quickly and cost effectively to help pave the way for critical intra-provider interoperability. When standards are finally in place and HIEs have matured, sometime down the road, providers will be prepared to take full advantage. In the interim, providers need to shift out of reactive mode when acquiring HIT solutions.

Recommended Policy Updates – Rather than spending more tax payer money on in-depth studies and delaying meaningful use requirements, HITECH and the ONC should;

Raise the bar on interoperability for EHR solution vendors. Force EHR vendors to adopt or “OEM” technologies that support providers’ migration from old paper and/or electronic records to their new EHR system or to a central records repository or database that can be accessed by updated EHR solutions or by clinical, operational or analytics systems. Right now, Epic and other EHR vendors often recommend “tiffing” files, i.e., creating an image of a record. Such records can only be searched as metadata. Unless the record, which is mostly text, is indexed before the image is created, the data within that record is not accessible.
The requirements for vendors qualifying for meaningful use dollars should be broadened to include non-EHR vendors that enable interoperability at the basic provider level. Most hospitals have multiple, non-compatible EHR systems in use throughout their environment. At present, however, the requirements for meaningful use are too narrow and the bar set too low for appropriate non-EHR solution vendors to qualify.

Recommended Provider Strategies – Aside from the relatively few healthcare providers that are leaders, that enjoy a relative abundance of resources and that have created a clear path to interoperability internally and for HIEs of the future, the vast majority of providers need to:

Stop spending exorbitant amounts of money on EHR solutions that lack the basic functionality to interoperate with existing HIT infrastructures. Vendors are transaction focused and will sell whatever customers say they want. Buyers need to demand more functionality from EHR vendors before they can expect better solutions.
Providers need a Healthcare Big Data strategy supported by senior management. IT needs a roadmap for implementing solutions that support meaningful use requirements as well as existing processes and workflows, while being affordable. Leaving the development of a Big Data strategy up to vendors does not lead to what’s best for providers.
Given resource constraints, providers need to set aside concerns about cloud adoption and identify other opportunities to outsource IT operations, services and support. Also, IT needs to take an inventory of existing solutions in use throughout their organization and identify which solutions can be cost-effectively repurposed across departments as opposed to supporting a siloed approach to solution and technology adoption. A recent IBM Sourcing Study points to the many motivations, benefits and best practices for outsourcing and partnering with technology vendors and service providers.

Cost-Effective Interoperability: Recommendations and Vendor Enablers

Looking across the spectrum of solutions that can cost-effectively support health records interoperability at the provider level (once a strategic healthcare data plan is in place), here are several recommendations for dramatically improving interoperability – right now.

The following list of vendors is not exhaustive, just representative of solutions in their respective category available today to meet providers’ needs. Most of these products already have a significant footprint in the provider space.

Intelligent Imaging Solutions and Services are readily available to transform handwritten notes and paper into machine-readable text which can then be indexed, categorized and stored in various types of content repositories offering easy access for EHR solutions, operational systems, medical informatics or analytics tools. Two of the top suppliers in this area are:

A2iA has made a major commitment to the healthcare provider space. Its technology is used by a broad set of healthcare-related services and solution companies from BPO companies that turn paper records into usable electronic formats and medical coding vendors dealing with CDI and ICD-10 codes, to content management vendors that embed A2iA technology into their products to enable cursive handwriting recognition. For the most part, A2iA delivers its solutions through its partner network.

Parascript is best known in the healthcare arena for the technology it brings to the medical imaging field including its neural network and algorithmic-based proprietary pattern recognition and image analysis technology that helps, for example, radiologists track suspicious lesions. Its technology also supports handwriting recognition including signature verification. Parascript primarily sells through channel partners.

Document Transformation Solutions providers take any document, fax, email or other text-based data, such as a continuity of care document, that can be sent to a printer or included in a print stream and store it in a compressed format while leaving the text available for indexing or searching. Two of the top suppliers in this area are:

Crawford Technology partners with both EMC and IBM to support their customers’ document transformation needs. Better known in the healthcare ecosystem to payers, Crawford helps to manage claims documents received by insurers from providers. Its document archive solutions represent a valuable tool for regulatory compliance, long-term archiving, and physical print and distribution reduction.

DATAWATCH products are used by business professionals at more than 1,000 hospitals across the country. Its Information Optimization Platform (IOP) helps customers quickly and easily extract, manage, analyze and distribute critical data and metrics from existing reports and data without additional programming. DATAWATCH also offers an on-premise or cloud-based clinical informatics solution.

Document-Oriented Databases are highly scalable and schema-less which means virtually any document format can be ingested, indexed and searched. PDF or Word documents or encodings such as XML and JSON are stored in a compressed binary format, not shredded as text-based data needs to be for relational databases. Two of the more popular document-oriented databases are:

Mark Logic is the database of choice for many of the world’s largest healthcare organizations including a fraud detection solution for CMS. Mark Logic helps healthcare organizations streamline their information interoperability, improve search and analysis, and optimize drug and clinical information. Mark Logic offers a free express license or an enterprise licensing model. Its database also has an integrated search capability.

MongoDB is one of the most popular document oriented open-source databases. Because data in MongoDB has a flexible schema, collections do not force a particular document structure. Therefore, “documents in the same collection do not need to have the same set of fields or structure, and common fields in a collection’s documents may hold different types of data.” MongoDB offers full indexing support, querying and commercial support from 10gen, IBM and others.

Conclusion

Interoperability at the provider level is critical to the overall healthcare interoperability initiative. It’s where most of our health records live, either on paper or in electronic form. Up to 80% of our healthcare data is text entered free form or with little structure by physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals. In order to mine that data for clinical, operational or research purposes, it is absolutely critical to make EHRs accessible to care providers and, to the extent practicable and appropriate, to patients.

Boiling the healthcare interoperability ocean by attempting to drive a nationwide standard will not achieve the desired results of improving care and lowering costs until the basic, foundational requirements of healthcare data management are first addressed at the local provider level. Many providers still rely on paper documents.

And until EHR solution vendors are forced, through a combination of policy changes and marketplace dynamics, to address their interoperability failings at the individual provider level, little progress will be made to transform healthcare records into a reliable nationwide resource.

Posted in Big Data, Healthcare Informatics, Information Governance, Information Management Thought Leadership | Tagged A2iA, Allscripts, Big Data, Crawford Technologies, DATAWATCH, EHR, Electronic Healthcare Records, EMC, Epic Systems, Healthcare, Healthcare IT, HITECH, IBM, interoperability, ITC Software, MarkLogic, Meaningful Use, MongoDB, New York Times, Obamacare, ONC, Parascript, Wall Street Journal | Leave a comment

Performance-Centric Data Storage TCO Study Demonstrates Cost Advantages of Flash Arrays

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Gary MacFadden

The SSD genie is out of the bottle. It is common knowledge that Solid State Drives (SSD) are many times faster than traditional hard disk drives (HDD) – which is why enterprise-grade SSD and Flash storage arrays are rapidly replacing traditional HDD-based storage solutions as the de facto standard for time sensitive, tier one applications. However, conventional wisdom dictates that SSD or Flash is much more expensive. In fact, when performance counts, Flash is not only faster, in many cases, Flash is also a lot less expensive than HDD.

A performance-centric data storage total cost of ownership (TCO) model recently developed by Parity Research demonstrates why Flash arrays are much more cost effective than HDD arrays. Parity compared an all-Flash array from WHIPTAIL to an all-HDD array. Details of the study are included in a complimentary whitepaper which can be downloaded from WHIPTAIL’s website. Highlights of the study include the following TCO assumptions, infographic and key findings. (To hear a 30 minute discussion on how the TCO elements were developed click here.)

TCO Assumptions

All necessary additional hardware and software costs bundled into pricing, including servers, switches, storage management software, racks, cabling, enclosures, storage operating systems and legacy storage interfaces (approximate cost: $30k to $40k).
Both performance arrays calculated at minimum 250k IOPS (400 IOPS per 15k RPM 150gb HHD and 4,000-plus IOPS for 150gb SSDs).
70% utilization rate for Flash array and 30% for all-HDD array includes data protection levels up to RAID 6.
$800 per square foot of data center rack space assumes a highly efficient data center with average availability needs (5 sq. feet per 2U rack).
200 watts per fully populated SSD enclosure, 400 watts for HDD primary enclosure and 200 for additional enclosures (cooling requires 1.2x number of watts to power. Cost of power calculation = .12/kwh).
Maintenance and drive longevity assumed to be the same.
Admin cost higher for HDD due to more components and additional tuning required.
Labor costs and training assumed to be the same for both systems.
Warranties and extended warranties assumed to be the same price.

Click on Image for Complete Infographic

Key Findings

HDD array costs over $500,000 more to maintain than SSD array over 5 years—almost equal to the cost of an additional, similarly configured Flash array.
HDD array takes up more than 8 times the physical space as a Flash array (24 disks per enclosure for both HDD and SSD).
HDD array consumes almost 10 times the power of Flash array.
Administrative costs are almost 500% higher with HDD array due to more disks (625 HDDs vs. 72 SSD) and added complexity, including additional management software and tuning, more wiring, mechanical components and more points of failure.
HDD deployment costs are more than 5 times the cost of deploying SSD Flash.
Flash array has more IOPS headroom for consolidating performance-centric application workloads, assuring required service levels.

HDD TCO Considerations

60% or more of HDDs spin empty all the time
Companies may have to spend upwards of $1 million to manage tiered or hybrid storage arrays.
Enterprise HDD storage can account for up to 6x the power consumption of servers
Since its introduction by IBM in 1956, basic HDD mechanics have not changed

Conclusion

While the TCO scenario depicted in the infographic is subject to a number of factors that would swing the cost advantage one way or the other, for today’s increasingly IOPS-intensive workloads, Flash arrays are definitively more cost effective and provide much higher performance than HDD performance arrays. HDD arrays will continue to provide value for applications where multiple petabyte scale capacity is needed or where speed and response time is not an issue, such as with archiving documents and other data that is infrequently accessed.

When application performance is the primary goal, Flash arrays are a far superior choice to HDD arrays on every level, including price.

Posted in Big Data, Information Governance, Information Management Trends | Tagged Big Data, Data Storage, Flash, HDD, SSD, TCO, WHIPTAIL | Leave a comment

Real-time Analytics and the Role of the Individual: Major Themes at GigaOM Big Data Event

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Gary MacFadden

To be human and living in the 21^st century is to rely on data, whether it is generated organically through some miracle of neurotransmission or produced by some electronic device. The most ardent technophiles among us believe – and they may be right – that for every problem in life there exists an electronically enhanced solution. Both people and computers need data to make decisions, and the collection, managing and parsing of that data along with the symbiotic relationship that exists between man and machine is what makes the big data space so compelling as well as complex.

The GigaOM Structure Data conference series, which kicked off in New York City March 20^th and 21^st, provided ample opportunity for attendees to catch more than 30 presentations and panel discussions, mix with other attendees and dialogue with a variety of Big Data solution providers. While there were too many presentations, vendor booths and opportunities for serendipitous interactions for one individual to absorb, I’ve tried to encapsulate what were, for me, some of the more meaningful moments at the event.

To quote GigaOM’s event recap, “Big Data needs people, leaders and real-time analytics.” I would add that the Big Data space also needs vendors and solution providers to improve their ability to engage aspirational users – not just work with leading edge organizations – and improve on their data integration capabilities. I’d also like to see more Big Data vendors tackling harder problems than trying to figure out, for instance, our purchasing habits or which college basketball team will go to the Final Four.

Big Data Thought Leadership on Display

Indeed there were several presentations that showcased Big Ideas for Big Data. Eric Berlow, TED Fellow and founder of Vibrant Data Labs, in his GigaOM presentation, asked the question, “Are algorithms actually making society dumber?” Vibrant is an example of collective creativity, which fosters collaboration among scientists, artists, designers and social investors developing “data-driven approaches to navigate the complex landscape of our most pressing problems and convert limited resources into problem solving engines for positive change.”

Berlow also talked about the challenges inherent in democratizing data and posed the question, “Can we do more?” Vibrant recently launched We The Data, a non-profit whose mission is to improve access to data for the “underserved,” support openness and trust by giving people both access to and the ability to control their own data and dramatically increase data literacy. Although he did not mention it, access to our personal health information (PHI) comes to mind – an issue Obamacare is tackling with some initial success, for example, vis-à-vis Medicare’s Blue Button.

Human and Machine Collaboration

A panel titled, What Does Collaboration Among Humans and Machines Really Look Like?, and comprised of Scott Brave, founder and CTO of Baynote, Timothy Estes, founder and CEO for Digital Reasoning and Jan Puzicha, co-founder and CTO at Recommind, discussed the importance of the interaction between people and thinking machines and also what machines and people do best. Brave pointed out that, for example, during an online buying experience, organizations often lose sight of the fact that there is a person at the other end of the computer and those people are queryable and can be much more involved in helping to improve the experience and help the supplier understand “What’s the right data?”

Estes added that machines have 3 key advantages over humans: (1) Scale, such as the ability to read billions of documents quickly, “unless humans have some Ray Kurzweil–style implant, which I hope doesn’t happen”; (2) Speed: although humans have the ability to receive thousands of sensory inputs to create a visual object, we can’t handle thousands of inputs simultaneously; and (3) Unifying the synthesis of data at scale and speed will never be achieved by humans; the data and judgments coming out of that synthesis can only be achieved by machines.

Estes also speculated about the future of the machine learning model and what data access might evolve to over the next decade. “We’re going to have a debate in culture and society about what to do with that. Will we have a Google-like model where it tells us what to do next and the data is all in one place? Or will we have software and technology that we own that does it for us as an extension of us?”

Estes believes we not only need to figure out what’s important to us in terms of what information and insights we want to extract from data, he also believes we need to push ourselves to try and solve harder problems. “We have a moral obligation to exploit and leverage data to the extent possible to fight global terrorism, mitigate financial risk or lower healthcare costs and improve health outcomes.”

Puzicha talked about the importance of integrating solutions with a workflow that feels natural for users. “It’s not so much about human vs. machine or the importance of the algorithm. It’s about how you synthesize the two in a system or module that allows the user to forget they are working with a machine learning system. It becomes an assistant, something they can iterate with. This requires a much deeper understanding of the use cases and a deep understanding of how that interaction happens. Creating a system that can be applied to multiple use cases within an organization is critical. From a human interaction perspective, it’s fundamentally the same usability problem applied across the enterprise.”

In a later breakout session, Recommind’s CEO Bob Tennant elaborated on the man and machine collaboration discussion. “Machine learning solutions are really good at precision and recall. You want to be able to easily ask and answer a question. But how do you surface that question? When a real-time search requires much more precision than Google delivers, it should not be necessary to have a team of data scientists perform that function. The technology has to be easy enough for the mass of users to derive value from the solution, whether it be for enabling a business process or an evidence-based healthcare application.”

Big Data Heuristics

CTO and Quid founder Sean Gourley, during his Where Is the Big Data Industry Going? presentation, challenged attendees to re-imagine the move from science to Data Intelligence. He used the example of how some medical informatics scientists are “obsessed with predicting illness rather than trying to figure out how to avoid illness.” Gourley proposes the creation of data sharing ecosystems that curate much richer data than can be found on social media sites.

Gourley laid out his Five Heuristics for Big Data:

Data has to be designed for humans with human-centered UIs.
We have to understand the limitations of the human brain.
Understand that data is messy, incomplete and biased.
Data needs a theory, so building models that understand theory is important.
Data needs stories, stories need data, so combine stories with data to make better decisions.

Gourley used the analogy of the centaur, half-man and half-horse, to argue that systems need to be designed to interface seamlessly between human and machine.

Databases of the Future: Where’s the Data Integration?

Thanks in large part to open source software guru Doug Cutting, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) demonstrates that the constraints of traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) can be overcome relatively easily and cost effectively. For example, users can address petabytes of data with a single query. (Cutting also developed the Lucene open-source framework or library widely used in text-based search engines.)

Based on software innovations developed at Yahoo! and Google, Hadoop has helped spawn a whole new category of application development tools. The last panel of the conference, Four for the Future: Upcoming Database Technologies that Are Not Hadoop, was moderated by GigaOM analyst David Linthicum. Much to his credit, he tactfully pressed the panelists on the role their companies play in providing data integration solutions or capabilities.

All four panelists agreed that the data integration challenge was largely up to the client to solve. The problem for most users is data integration is messy and costly, and lack of data integration is generally the biggest barrier to deriving new insights or business value from existing information sources. It’s understood that no two organizations have the same data profile or integration requirements. But as long as Linthicum kept bringing up the topic, I was looking for at least one panelist to address the integration issue. None did.

Damian Black, CEO of SQLstream, talked about the value of and the increasingly more cost-effective use of in-memory processing – whether using Hadoop or not. Black is an enthusiastic advocate for leveraging SQL as a de facto query language standard. “SQL is a lingua franca for queries. Enterprises like SQL as do developers who want structure and a framework. Streaming technology has moved to real-time and will become more prevalent and affordable.”

Emil Eifrem, CEO and founder of Neotechnology, stated he did not enjoy panels where everyone agreed. “Queries don’t have to run in-memory and premature standardization kills innovation. Easy to use APIs and things you can’t express in SQL are critical, and modern developers are happy to learn new things.” Eifrem believes that the NoSQL market is headed for more consolidation. “A few years ago we had twenty NoSQL database companies. Now we have five or so, including open-source DB players like Basho, Cassandra, Couchbase, MongoDB and Neo4j. The key value store and document store databases will merge and compete.”

Ryan Garrett, VP of Product for MemSQL, agreed with Black that SQL will be the standard for non-relational database queries. He added that “there will be much wider adoption of in-memory DB systems as both memory and storage continue to become more affordable; and the use cases are going to be more widely recognized, while data volumes will continue to grow.”

TempoDB CEO Andrew Cronk weighed in on the future of time-series data and the impact of mobile devices. “If you believe GE’s marketing of the industrial Internet or Cisco’s view that the Internet is everything, and you believe there will be more connected devices and more stuff about our sales environment, then you’ve got to believe in the explosion of connected devices and time-series data. And,” he added, smiling, “it will all be in TempoDB.”

Solution Providers of Interest

No doubt I have missed several vendor sponsors that, if there had been more time to meet them, would prove to be most interesting. At any rate, the following is a short, alphabetical list of those solution providers I did speak with at the event or those vendors for whom I have some working knowledge.

Cleversafe has a solution that allows limitless data storage, whether the data is stored locally in a data center, at remote locations or with cloud service providers. The obvious appeal of geographically dispersed information is data protection, but also leveraging the cost of storage as well as scaling more easily for big data projects.

CloudSigma is a cloud service provider based in Switzerland that has moved entirely to Flash storage. CEO Robert Jenkins, who was a panelist at the conference, says the move to all SSD or Flash storage is justified because the service he provides to customers is now so much faster than it had been. CloudSigma is planning to open up two facilities in the U.S. later this year.

Digital Reasoning enables enterprises to detect fraud, uncover market trends, gain better insight into customer behavior, gain competitive advantage, and mitigate risk. Its flagship product Synthesys leverages entity analytics to uncover critical facts and relationships from very large and diverse data stores. The company works with government, financial and healthcare organizations offering both on-premise and cloud-based solutions.

Hortonworks spun off from Yahoo! and is one of the leading open source Hadoop distributions. The Hortonworks Data Platform (HDF) is targeted at organizations that want to combine the power and cost-effectiveness of Apache Hadoop with the advanced services and reliability required for enterprise deployments.

IBM has perhaps the most comprehensive portfolio of Big Data–related solutions and services, including major upgrades to their legacy databases and newer Hadoop-based offerings. Unlike many Big Data vendors, IBM also offers information integration, governance and migration services and solutions as well as the hardware and storage assets to support Big Data projects – not to mention cloud-based solutions.

LucidWorks offers an open source enterprise search platform based on Lucene. It recently announced a near real-time indexing capability, and its Big Data solution offers an application development platform that enables comprehensive search, discovery and analysis of an organization’s content and user interactions.

MapR is an enterprise-grade Hadoop platform that supports a broad set of mission-critical and real-time use cases. Well known for its big, named partner ecosystem that includes Amazon, Cisco and Google, the company just this month closed a $30-million new round of funding. MapR touts dependability, ease-of-use and world-record speed to Hadoop, NoSQL, database and streaming applications in one, unified Big Data platform.

MarkLogic provides an enterprise-grade NoSQL document-centric database that enables organizations to manage a variety of data types. Key features include ACID transactions, horizontal scaling, real-time indexing, high availability, disaster recovery and government-grade security, while offering search across disparate data types, including text, images, date/time, geospatial and currency culled from multiple repositories or systems.

Recommind has made a name for itself in the legal ediscovery space but is now leveraging its CORE analytics platform to help customers solve Big Data challenges. It offers customers the ability to access and understand unstructured data, without the need for taxonomies or natural language processing, by using machine learning techniques.

Tableau is one of the more popular data visualization and business intelligence tools in the market. Its solution allows non-programmers to query data relatively quickly and easily. Users can view data from integrated dashboards and share mobile and browser-based interactive analytics and ad hoc reports.

Impressions and Conclusion

The Big Data space is packed with large incumbent vendors like EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle who are busy acquiring companies, trying to innovate and also protecting their turf.

The plethora of smaller companies, many of whom are well funded and/or well regarded, are pushing the envelope in many ways, especially in the database space where even the largest enterprises have felt compelled to adopt Hadoop or other NoSQL solutions that offer much more scale and flexibility at a lower cost than traditional RDBMSs.

The search and analytics space is also wide open for new players, especially those that can handle a variety of Big Data sources of both structured and unstructured data including text and images. Vendor consolidation down the road is a given – similar to other markets when they begin to mature.

I look forward to the day when any of these products can be used easily – as easily as a Google search – by non-technical people and any organization of any size can afford these capabilities. For now, early adopters with deep pockets and tech-savvy individuals are the primary beneficiaries of all this incredible intellectual property.

Posted in Big Data, Information Management Thought Leadership, Information Management Trends | Tagged Analytics, Basho, Baynote, Big Data, Blue Button, Cassandra, Cleversafe, CloudSigma, Couchbase, Digital Reasoning, GigaOM, Hadoop, Hortonworks, IBM, Lucene, LucidWorks, MapR, MarkLogic, MemSQL, MongoDB, Neo4j, Neotechnology, Quid, Recommind, SQLstream, Tableau, TempoDB, Vibrant Data Labs, WeTheData | Leave a comment

Information Governance: Rx for Electronic Healthcare Records Interoperability Dilemma

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Gary MacFadden

Syntel Healthcare Solutions Architecture

Syntel Healthcare Solutions Overview

The healthcare industry could benefit enormously from the implementation of information governance programs and solutions. Healthcare, like every other industry, is inundated with data – now generically referred to as Big Data. In particular, unstructured data (mostly text) found in documents, emails and SOAP notes is a huge challenge for providers to manage as that data is often locked into distributed systems and formats that are difficult for health systems to access because they lack the ability to exchange data.

Hospitals and other health providers that rely on a variety of complex IT systems should not expect electronic healthcare records (EHR) solutions alone to solve the unstructured data interoperability problem. This is the case because, first and foremost, EHRs are billing systems. Second, providing additional functionality to meet minimum Meaningful Use (MU) criteria has proven to be a greater challenge for EHR systems than most buyers expected and, perhaps, EHR solution providers anticipated.

Negative Press for EHRs

Over the past few months, EHR vendors and their advocates have been taking a pummeling in the press. For instance, a recent article in The New York Times entitled, A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Industry, blames EHR vendors, lobbyists and misinformed politicians for luring hospitals and physicians into a “tantalizing pitch: come get a piece of a $19 billion government giveaway.”, referring to MU incentive money.

In reality, the EHR problem is much more complex and, in large part, relies on the complicity of an entire industry that is conditioned to spend $750 billion a year on all sorts of healthcare related technology frequently over-investing in equipment and solutions that produce less than expected or mediocre results.

percentage-physicians-whose-electronic-health-records-provided-selected-benefits

Benefits of EHRs

Yes, EHR solutions are very expensive, for the most part not very intuitive and are interoperability challenged. But part of the blame rests on the shoulders of healthcare information technology (HIT) buyers who need to better understand what technologies work best to support existing, proven workflows, and they need to stop investing exorbitant amounts of money in less than satisfactory IT solutions – which is no easy task. HIT buyers are under tremendous pressure from policy makers, changing market dynamics as well as internal sources to lower cost and improve outcomes.

Banks and financial services companies are finding out that migrating large amounts of unstructured data into one big, consolidated repository usually doesn’t work very well – although I do know of one exceptional case where a Fortune 100 company implemented a unified message archive that includes all electronic correspondence between its 12k brokers and its customers/prospects which now holds over 2 billion records. The solution works well primarily due to the culture, foresight and tech-savvy of that organization.

Like other industries, unstructured healthcare data is found across the enterprise in multiple systems such as billing, content management, lab systems (pathology systems), message archives as well as EHR systems. Records in those systems contain unstructured personal and financial PCI information, protected health information (PHI) and PII data.

Despite HIPAA privacy regulations and the best efforts of conscientious healthcare professionals, data is not managed as well as it could be and makes its way into unsecured smart phones, tablets, laptops and file shares. Healthcare providers are as vulnerable to attacks and security breaches as any organization that holds valuable personal data.

The Information Governance Basics

Organizations who have implemented successful information governance (IG) programs have several attributes in common:

Someone in the organization who has money, power and influence ,“Gets it”.
The organization understands IG is a “process” not an overnight change.
Technology advances are making Big Data volume less of a problem.
Data visibility, not volume, is the problem that needs to be solved.
Information Governance programs are a driver of business value.
Well managed IG programs more than pay for themselves.
These organizations have asked, “What can I get rid of?”

Patience, planning, process innovation, technology investment and senior management support are all integral to the success of an IG program, and can lead to substantial savings. It is not unusual to find a large organization that can quantify savings of more than $100 million realized through implementing an IG program.

It has taken most of these organizations three or more years to fully implement an IG program that produces savings or return on investment (ROI) of this magnitude. But there are several initial steps which can be taken to lower cost and improve interoperability relatively quickly.

Healthcare Information Governance Benefits

In the course of meeting a healthcare organization’s long-term IG objectives, there are several tactical challenges that can be addressed, with the help of IT solutions, to improve interoperability, lower costs and secure data including:

Creating an index of unstructured data to manage distributed records “in-place”.
Getting rid of “stuff” such as duplicates and personal data “in the wild”.
Reducing the amount of data storage needed to host records.
Speeding up access time to patient records and information.
Improving visibility and security for unstructured data.
Meeting MU, regulatory and compliance requirements.

Once a healthcare IG program is established, longer term benefits include:

Obviate the need to migrate or reformat incompatible unstructured data types.
Ability to create value from patient records for research and analytics.
Support data propagation for clinical decision support systems (CDS).
Access historical patient records to improve operations efficiency.
Improve support for CPOE, patient portals and quality measures.
Drive cost savings initiatives and improve patient outcomes.

Information Governance Solution Providers

There are scores of firms who offer information governance consulting services and several healthcare portals provide additional information on IG in healthcare including, AHIMA, NHS and Health DM along with industry groups such as ISACA which published an EHR certification criteria related to security.

Here is a short list of IG technology and solutions vendors healthcare providers, payers, pharma and other members of the healthcare ecosystem should consider when evaluating an information governance partner:

EMC has one of the broadest and deepest IG solutions portfolios in the industry which includes analytics, archiving, case management, cloud services, content management, data protection, digital rights management, ediscovery, intelligent capture, search and security offerings through its RSA division. EMC EHR Framework

IBM is arguably the preeminent IG thought leader via its support and sponsorship of the programs such as the CGOC. IBM’s highly successful information lifecycle governance (ILG) group is focused on “Information Economics” which aligns information value with cost. IBM also has an extensive portfolio of IG products and services.

Nuix is a fast growing IG specialist based in Sydney, Australia that has built a loyal following with both service providers and end-user customers in North America, EMEA and Asia Pac. Nuix just delivered a new release of its IG platform, Nuix Luminate, which makes it possible for customers to more easily attack their Big Data challenges.

Rational Retention has developed its Rational Intelligence solution as an end-to-end information governance and ediscovery solution with integrated and highly advanced machine learning for in-place classification and predictive coding. RR developed its software suite in conjunction with industry leading healthcare informatics specialists.

Posted in Healthcare Informatics, Information Governance, Information Management Best Practices, Strategic Information Management | Tagged AHIMA, Big Data, CGOC, EHR, Electronic Healthcare Records, EMC, Healthcare, IBM, Information Governance, Meaningful Use, New York Times, NHS, Nuix, Rational Retention | Leave a comment

Information Governance Reshaping eDiscovery Landscape: A Major Theme at Legal Tech 2013

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Gary MacFadden

The Big Question that consumed me as I strode into The New York Hilton and up the escalator to receive my Legal Tech 2013 version of the Vulcan mind meld was, “Have legal, IT, business execs and other interested parties finally realized that ediscovery preparedness is one of the many benefits to be derived from a larger effort to manage and govern information across the enterprise?” The answer is…a qualified “Yes”.

Compared with Legal Tech 2010, where broaching the idea of an information governance (IG) approach was anathema to most ediscovery vendors flush with customers looking for tactical solutions to quell their litigation fires, this year’s event signals a tipping point for the industry: A shift from reactive to proactive ediscovery.

For better or worse, now that organizations of all sizes are feeling the impact of Big Data, the broader Legal Tech community appears to have finally understood that IG is more than a catch phrase. Information governance is a necessary evolution that enables organizations to transform the way they manage information risk, lower costs and derive value from their data.

Info Gov Buzz

For proof of IG’s arrival in the Legal Tech zeitgeist, attendees needed to venture no farther then the keynote address delivered by The Honorable Andrew J. Peck who suggested that IG will replace predictive coding as the next big litigation support trend. “Despite the economy, companies are going to realize that it’s important to institute retention and information governance programs in order to get rid of data that has no business need and mine data for its business value.”

Likewise, Clearwell’s interview with ediscovery crusader, author and luminary Laura Zubulake is filled with IG predictions and insights including, “I view ediscovery as a subset of a broader information governance effort. Organizations will realize that ediscovery should be part of a broader information governance effort. Information governance will become a division within a corporation with separate accountable management from which operations, legal, IT, HR professionals can source and utilize information to achieve goals.”

In addition, several Legal Tech 2013 “wrap-up” blogs devoted large portions of their posts to the IG phenomenon. Barry Murphy of eDiscovery Journal writes that he wouldn’t be surprised to see more chief information security officers (CISO) at LTNY in the coming years, and that the ARMA sessions were full all day. ARMA has been promoting IG and its GARP principals for a few years now.

Sean Doherty of Law Technology News frequently mentions IG in his vendor reviews, and Exterro, through its eDiscovery Beat blog, recommends organizations should “stop the talking” and begin implementing information governance plans.

Also, the Unfiltered Orange daily (or weekly) ediscovery newsletter update managed by Rob Robinson, VP of Marketing for Orange Legal Technology, is an ongoing source of aggregated IG and ediscovery news, events, links to blogs and thought leaders.

Implementing Information Governance Programs

As the saying goes, “We’ve identified the problem. Now comes the hard part.” While some shared consciousness of IG benefits has occurred within organizations, in particular those entities within highly litigious and regulated industries such as banking, energy, government, healthcare, insurance, life sciences, big pharma and utilities, it is typically only a small fraction of the largest, forward thinking firms that have successfully implemented information governance programs thus far.

A panel discussion sponsored by Nuix entitled, Advanced Information Governance: Reduce the Pain of Your Next Case contained valuable insights from real-world practitioners.

Moderated by the always entertaining and informative IG consultant, evangelist and author, Barclay Blair, the panel included Bennett Borden, Partner and Founder IG Practice; Williams Mullen LLP, Duke Alden, JD, Vice President, Global Information Governance, Aon; Bob Lewis, Director Cyber Forensics & Investigations, Barclays; and Nuix’s Chief Technology Officer, Stephen L. Stewart.

Key takeaways from the panel included:

Technology advances are making Big Data volume less of a problem
Data visibility, not volume, is the problem that needs to be solved
Information Governance programs are a driver of business value
Organizations need to ask, “What can I get rid of?”
Total cost of storage is more than double the cost per gigabyte
Well managed IG programs more than pay for themselves
When looking for IG program sponsorship, find people in the organization who have money and power, and who “get it”.

According to Bennett Borden, several large companies he has consulted with have saved more than $100 million dollars implementing an IG program. The savings include lower cost per ediscovery event and a reduction in IT support costs such as storage. Borden recommends finding an advocate who understands the value of an IG program, someone who has the influence and passion to support the ongoing effort – which can take years. However, Borden suggests starting with lower hanging fruit such as defensible deletion programs that can provide a relatively quick return on investment (ROI).

Bob Lewis talked about how departments within Barclay’s, such as IT and business units, lacked an understanding of how data is used and its value across the organization. For instance, Lewis said bank employees created 1.5 billion emails per year but had very little knowledge of or visibility into the content of those emails let alone what emails should be kept. He suggested the deployment of business intelligence or analytics tools to help improve the situation citing the example that Barclay’s now runs daily searches on 12 specific phrases to help solve a variety of issues pertaining to email communications.

Duke Alden shared some of his experiences leading the development of the IG program for Aon over the last 3 years. According to Alden, Aon early on made the decision to have the IG program report into finance as they believed the legal department would be viewed as too rigid to more easily embrace all of the departments and lines of business that could benefit from the program. “Lawyers are typically trained to say ‘No’. We needed them and others to say ‘Yes’ and get all departments to ask themselves, ‘What do I need and why? Finance was the logical place for us to house the IG function because the clear benefit was savings throughout the organization.”

Now that the IG program is maturing, Alden says the IG program is focusing more on analytics that lines of business can use to mine data and create value for the corporation. “Now that we’ve demonstrated what we can do, we are trusted throughout the organization. Housing the IG program in finance allowed us to interact with the organization in a much more liquid way than if we were part of legal.”

Information Governance, Big Data and Analytics

Just as FRCP rule changes and high profile court cases such as Zubulake v. UBS Warburg and Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe have paved the way for ediscovery and predictive coding, the need to control Big Data and derive value from electronically stored information (ESI) has been a catalyst for information governance solutions.

As the scope of ediscovery requests has expanded far beyond email, file shares and desktops, savvy users have realized that implementing repeatable, defensible processes can save time and money. Simultaneously, the growth of organizational data stores has put more pressure on vendors to scale their offerings far beyond their original intent.

IG solutions that scale better have exploited grid-like architectures or parallel processing capabilities. Some vendors have also developed search algorithms that obviate the need for taxonomies to drive relevancy and speed as opposed to a natural language processing (NLP) approach – which can also be effective depending on the implementation.

Still other information governance solutions deploy both NLP and statistical techniques to find, index, analyze, categorize or otherwise manage ESI – especially unstructured text-based ESI including documents, emails, instant messages, social media and wikis. IG solutions also have the ability to “learn” from intelligent users who select “seed” documents for predictive coding or document categorization applications.

The next logical outgrowth of a maturing information governance solutions marketplace is the ability for IG vendors to leverage the much larger analytics opportunity in the form of purpose-built appliances, services, software suites, toolsets and turn-key applications. To some extent, this IG vendor maturation process is already in motion.

Information Governance and eDiscovery Vendors

Given the underlying technology and the reactive market dynamics, the ediscovery solutions space is a logical starting point for information governance solutions to take root. It’s a classic example of repurposing existing technology beyond its original, intended use. Meanwhile, with a plethora of vendors now jumping on the IG bandwagon, buyers and partners need to educate themselves.

That said, I have repurposed my Enterprise eDiscovery Landscape “Super Quadrant”, created in 2011, to reflect changes in the ediscovery landscape as vendors and service providers address emerging IG solutions opportunities. The IG Super Quadrant is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of the IG vendor landscape. That would entail the inclusion of more than 100 companies. Rather, the IG Landscape Super Quadrant is a representative example of vendors that have declared themselves players in the IG space or that I consider IG enablers. Several of the listed companies I met with at LTNY 2013.

Information Governance Super Quadrant

Here are a few things to consider when viewing the IG Super Quadrant:

The IG Super Quadrant tends to favor larger companies who offer “Suites” of IG related products and services including analytics, archive, ediscovery, information and data management, search, security and forensics. The bigger the “dot”, the bigger the company in the IG space.

The fact that no “dot” fully resides in the “Sweet Spot” region, which is at the intersection of all four “Sets”, indicates that no single vendor offers a complete suite of IG tools. There is always room for additional services, integration and product enhancement.

Point solution vendors often have superior products in their class but appear farther from the “Sweet Spot”.

The vast majority of ediscovery point solution vendors are not included.

Most vendors have cloud-enabled services or partners. Those vendors who are primarily cloud-based appear in the Cloud and Service Providers “Set”.

Vendors conspicuously absent from LTNY this year but who made it into the IG Super Quadrant include Amazon, CommVault, Google, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP.

Information Governance Vendor Snapshots

ABBYY integrates OCR, ICR and other recognition and linguistic technologies to help speed the process of converting paper to ESI. ABBYY also supports intelligent capture and document recognition which automates document classification and enables information governance programs, streamlines processes, cuts document handling costs and improves an organizations ability to retrieve and correlate electronic information.

AccessData is one of the leading providers of ediscovery, computer forensics and cyber security software for law firms, corporations and government agencies. AccessData has enterprise-class, stand-alone solutions including its FTK forensics as well as the legal review solution Summation and also provides various services related to ediscovery, forensics, investigations, incident response and information assurance. This year, Access Data announced a “streamlined” version of Summation along with ediscovery support for mobile devices with its Mobile Phone Examiner Plus.

akaibu is a new software company “dedicated to helping organizations move their legacy data archives safely, quickly, and reliably to new archive platforms, storage or applications. The flagship product Akaibu Evolve, integrates with Autonomy Zantaz, Symantec Enterprise Vault, Mimecast, Microsoft Exchange, Live Office and other ‘cloud’ archives, to simplify time-consuming migrations.”

Amazon is the largest cloud-based service provider today serving companies large and small in a variety of industries. It’s website lists more than a dozen companies that provide hosted ediscovery services and an equal number of partners who provide information governance services and solutions. Several of the vendors mentioned in this report leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS).

BIA for the past 10 years has primarily been an ediscovery service provider. That changed in 2011 when BIA announced its entry into cloud-based ediscovery with the launch of the TotalDiscovery solution providing legal hold, data gathering and early case assessment (ECA) tools. Their solutions and services are marketed to companies of all sizes and law firms in the U.S. and abroad.

C2C is an message archiving specialist that has experienced steady growth over the last decade in the States and abroad particularly in Britain and France. The flagship ArchiveOne Enterprise solution has proven to be scalable for some of the world’s largest corporations. C2C also offers a cloud-based solution that appeals to smaller organizations that prefer to host their archives rather than grapple with them on their own.

Catalyst specializes in hosted ediscovery with many technology partners in the sector as well as services for organizations throughout the ecosystem. Maintaining four of its own data centers, including one in Japan, the Catalyst platform “covers the heart of the litigation lifecycle from processing, analytics, search, review and production. Its Insight solution delivers secure, fast, “stunning visual analytics and customizable review workflow”, allowing customers to manage “even the largest and most complex cases.”

Cicayda is a software start-up “led by founders who have done it before, seeks to disrupt the entire ediscovery market with cool apps, killer UX and pricing sanity.” At LTNY, Cicayda launched Fermata, a cloud-based, pay-as-needed legal hold management product which will be followed by other offerings including processing, review, search and text analytics. Cicayda boasts an intuitive interface, easy, secure and flexible access.

CommVault Simpana is an integrated solution that offers message archiving, backup and recovery, replication and data searching capabilities across the enterprise and any storage device in a secure environment. CommVault helps customers “transform the way users access, discover and use Big Data” while helping them determine how best to “retain and, ultimately, delete content in compliance with evolving regulations and case law.”

Cylance is a products and services company “dedicated to solving the world’s most complex security challenges and safeguarding your data.” Cylance recently acquired SpearPoint Security Services as well as hiring several security experts to fill out their portfolio. SpearPoint will be integrated with Cylance’s services and research teams to enhance its Presponse service line which includes assessment and discovery capabilities.

Daegis recently announced several enhancements to its Edge ediscovery platform including search analytics with advanced reporting features which extend iterative search capabilities to include sub-queries and the ability to trump, or order, the results to review thereby reducing the time and cost of review. Daegis, via the merger with Unify, also offers a highly scalable archiving solution supporting both on premise and cloud-based deployments and has also delivered an Hadoop-based technology assisted review (TAR) solution dubbed Acumen.

Deloitte last year acquired the assets of IE Discovery, a provider of ediscovery management and litigation support solutions that primarily serves federal government clients. Deloitte also takes a “comprehensive approach to governance, risk management and regulatory compliance” offering “knowledge and experience” which few firms with global resources can match including an information governance practice in China.

EMC has one of the broadest and deepest information governance solutions portfolios in the industry which includes analytics, archiving, case management, cloud-services, content management, data protection, digital rights management, ediscovery, intelligent capture, search and security offerings through its RSA division. EMC has migrated some of its IG solutions to the cloud, has back up and recovery capabilities with its Avamar suite, federated indexing capabilities through the Kazeon product line in addition to deduplication solutions. The challenge for any large firm that has acquired so many solutions is when and how well will all the parts be integrated. EMC continues to make progress toward that end.

Ernst & Young over the last two years has been expanding its forensic technology and discovery services worldwide adding consultants, technology partners and a lab to complement existing fraud investigation and business modeling skills. “Understanding the business process under review and mapping processes against the analytical model is a key to the accuracy with which we can identify frauds and fraud risks.”

Exterro Fusion is a leading ediscovery software suite with several enhancements for 2013 including predictive intelligence capabilities, in place ECA, automatics document categorization with pattern matching and SQL-like query, tokenized fields for advanced redaction and data analytics. Exterro has also expanded its managed services capabilities and entered into partner agreements to host their solutions and customer data in the cloud.

FTI is a global business advisory firm with a strong presence in the ediscovery space. FTI announced the launch of Ringtail Version 8.3 which now can be accessed and managed in a “secure, self-service private cloud. 8.3 also provides “improved review workflow and other management tools to support faster, more accurate legal reviews. FTI also provides a managed service model as well as a hybrid software/services approach.

HP Autonomy announced several “significant enhancements to its market-leading ediscovery offering” as part of a “comprehensive platform that connects archiving, data protection, enterprise content management, ediscovery, information governance and meaning-based analytics.” These enhancements include extending “meaning-based coding” to Autonomy early case assessment (ECA) and structured data analytics through HP’s Application Information Optimizer that automates the migration and/or retirement of application data and allows the ediscovery solution to “seamlessly” ingest and review structured data. HP also announced an 80% increase in client ediscovery data volumes over the last 12 months, a number, I assume, derived from both in-house clients and their cloud-based repository. The HP Autonomy portfolio merger still faces many business and technology integration challenges in order for HP to succeed in shifting to a more software-centric, higher profit margin business model.

Gimmal is a leading provider of software and services that enhance SharePoint records management and interoperability capabilities. Gimmal recently announced a solution that links SAP ERP solutions with SharePoint transforming it into a “platform that manages all content, increases compliance, reduces risk and supports ediscovery” allowing users to move closer to an information governance framework.

Google, by virtue of its preeminent role as curator for much of the world’s email and correspondence, last year announced Google Apps Vault for business customers. Vault is an “easy-to-use and cost-effective solution for managing information critical to your business and preserving important data. It can reduce the costs of litigation, regulatory investigation and compliance actions. Vault helps protect your business with easy-to-use search so you can quickly find and preserve data to respond to unexpected customer claims, lawsuits or investigations.”

Guidance Software has been busy integrating the CaseCentral acquisition that occurred early last year. EnCase eDiscovery v5 combines elements of existing Guidance ediscovery technology assets with the CaseCentral secure cloud-based capabilities delivering a “seamless integration” with significant performance improvements including new parallel processing capabilities, and enhanced search and indexing algorithms. Guidance is also well known for its forensic tools and services.

IBM announced the completion of its StoredIQ acquisition last week and expects to continue to dominate the large enterprise Information Governance Lifecycle (ILG) landscape. Much of the StoredIQ integration with IBM ILG offerings already existed prior to the acquisition due to existing partnerships on specific client engagements. On the heels of its successful Defensible Disposal program and thought leadership via its support and sponsorship of the CGOC, IBM’s ILG group is focused on “Information Economics” which aligns information value with cost. “If information does not have value it should not cost anything. Information value is defined by business value and duty to preserve for regulation or litigation.” The challenge for IBM is how to transfer these ILG assets and capabilities to small and medium companies through its partner network.

Index Engines through its Octane platform provides “innovative, high speed ESI identification, collection and preservation.” Initially a technology built for large backup tape remediation projects, Index Engines now offers on-site deployment or a more cost effective cloud service. Both options allow clients to index compete tape content, deduplicate, de-NIST the data set and make the searchable index available online.

Iron Mountain is a large provider of off-site physical records storage also offering records and information management solutions through consulting, technology and services for “defensible compliance, records unification, data backup and recovery.” IronMountain has created a collaborative platform to help law firms explore an IG framework and is partnering with industry leaders to design and host the Law Firm IG Symposium.

kCura announced major enhancements to their well-regarded ediscovery platform Relativity, with the roll out of version 7.5, which includes the addition of complete processing capabilities, as well as improvements to usability, analytics, infrastructure management, and its software development kit (SDK), along with “significant updates to Relativity Assisted Review – which is a flexible and transparent computer-assisted-review workflow that allows users to train Relativity based on their expertise.”

Konica Minolta is a leading provider of document solutions, IT services, ediscovery and computer forensics for legal pros. Dispatcher Phoenix Legal is a “powerful electronic document workflow software solution that simplifies document management. It includes advanced Bates stamping features, a highly accurate OCR engine to convert image files to searchable PDF and searchable PDF/a’s, redaction and highlighting capabilities.”

Kofax is a leading provider of capture enabled business process management (BPM) solutions. “Kofax automates information-intensive processes to help enterprises streamline operations, increase productivity & better engage with their customers for a competitive advantage & growth.” Kofax is one of the largest providers of intelligent capture solutions which support information governance and ediscovery processes.

Kroll Ontrack has long provided services to meet the ediscovery, forensic and ESI management and needs of its customers. At LTNY last year, they launched Verve, a cloud-based ediscovery solution that compliments Kroll’s portfolio of do-it-yourself (DIY) software solutions to help laws firms and corporations manage their ESI in preparation for and in response to ediscovery requests.

Microsoft through its SharePoint solution provides a collaboration, records management and document repository platform critical for many organizations worldwide. While Microsoft has defined a framework for SharePoint information governance, the bulk of the implementation is left to its vast partner network many of whom are listed in this note or found on its website creating a huge opportunity for value-added-reseller software solutions, integration services and consulting. Microsoft Azure and 365 are Microsoft’s entries into cloud-based infrastructures to support, Exchange, Outlook, SharePoint and other non-Microsoft solutions.

Mimecast provides a secure, highly available, cloud-based unified email management platform serving the continuity and archiving needs of organizations, mostly Exchange users, in a variety of industries. Mimecast enables fast access to tamperproof email and data to “support the most demanding requirements for email law and email compliance.” Mimecast also supports early case assessment (ECA) and litigation holds.

Mitratech is a leader in the Collaborative Accountability Applications (CAA) space. It’s TeamConnect solution is “the only end-to-end platform addressing the complete spectrum of solutions for legal operations: spend management, claims litigation management, and GRC automation requirements.” TeamConnect is modular giving organizations the ability to add products over time, and comes in hosted, in-house or hybrid configurations.

Nuance designs, delivers and has acquired a number of technologies and solutions that make knowledge workers more effective from their Dragon Systems speech recognition software to document scanning and conversion programs that “transform the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents.” Nuance has optimized these solutions and others for many industries including healthcare and legal.

Nuix is a fast growing information management specialist based in Sydney, Australia that has built a loyal following with both service providers and end-user customers as well as with ediscovery partners in North America, EMEA and Asia Pac. Coinciding with LTNY, Nuix announced the release of its IG platform Nuix Luminate which “makes it possible to search, investigate and actively manage unstructured data sets of any size or complexity.” Nuix is rumored to be working on a cloud-based version of its core product which should open up additional opportunities for the company.

OpenText offers an Information Governance Solution that unites records management, ediscovery and archiving to “meet compliance requirements, ensure litigation readiness, and reduce legal, compliance and financial risk.” OpenText is addressing the explosive growth of unstructured ESI in the form of documents, email and other business content that, when left unmanaged, produce significant cost and risk.

Oracle does not have a product line or strategy that specifically addresses information governance. However, as litigants have found out and legal services and attorneys know, an increasing number of ediscovery requests include structured and unstructured data contained in or managed by Oracle ERP solutions and databases. As with Microsoft, Oracle has passed on much of the responsibility for IG to partners and the co-competition – at least from a go-to-market perspective – which is odd because Oracle has acquired content management solution provider Stellent and the enterprise search solution vendor Endeca. Despite a lapse in public pronouncements of IG direction, Oracle is still a force.

Proofpoint has considerably enhanced its core, information security-as-a-service business over the last several years acquiring cloud-based archiving, message security, data and threat protection solutions. Recent acquisition NextPage helps clients determine which IG model, or combination of approaches, best suits a company’s unique requirements including; proactive, reactive, centralized and de-centralized governance.

Rational Retention developed its Rational Intelligence solution as a “true the end-to-end information governance and ediscovery solution with integrated and highly advanced machine learning for in place classification and predictive coding.” RR’s intelligent coding allows an organization to codify the decision processes of an expert reviewer into a statistical model, and then automatically apply that model across a broad set of data.

Recommind believes “automating the process of finding and storing relevant information can dramatically improve the speed, accuracy and cost effectiveness of records management.” Recommind is applying its proven Decisiv Categorization product and innovative CORE (Context Optimized Relevancy Engine) platform to address unstructured Big Data challenges in the enterprise to meet compliance, ediscovery and other critical business needs.

RenewData is a full service ediscovery provider offering a broad spectrum of review acceleration services. RD launched a language-based analytics offering as a “more transparent, auditable alternative to Technology-Assisted-Review”. Their services combine “proven technology and expertise to uniquely deliver significant time and cost savings for ediscovery and investigations without relying on artificial intelligence.”

RSD believes the information governance challenge facing the enterprise today is of strategic significance. “Those who understand, plan and execute to address this challenge will have a competitive advantage in extremely touch economic conditions.” RSD provides IG consulting services as well as its GLASS platform that helps organizations manage and enforce multi-jurisdictional policies and granularity of governance events.

SAP provides IG thought leadership and case studies for download on their website. However, SAP’s primary IG messaging is around its Enterprise Information Management (EIM) solutions that “can help you better manage big data, improve governance, and accelerate decision making with timely, consistent, and trustworthy information at every level of your enterprise.” EIM solutions tend to be more focused on structured data found in SAP ERP solutions. But as most litigation cognoscenti know too well, ERP data is much more in demand for ediscovery requests. It’s HANA “in-memory” analytics solution has been very successful thus far. SAP partners with several ediscovery technology and services companies including IBM and ZyLAB.

Symantec announced its Intelligent Information Governance (IIG) solution about a year ago, following its acquisitions of ediscovery solutions provider Clearwell and cloud-based message archiver LiveOffice. The integration between Symantec’s market-leading on-premise message archive solution Enterprise Vault (EV) and Clearwell was relatively straight forward as connectors had been built between the two solutions prior to the acquisition – at the request of several clients. Last Summer, EV and Clearwell achieved a higher level of integration; comprehensive legal hold functionality, “which extends Clearwell’s robust legal hold notification solution to include preservation of data in Enterprise Vault. This enables information in Enterprise Vault to be preserved in the controlled environment of the archive, eliminating the need to copy and move information for preservation, and reducing risk.” Meanwhile, Symantec lags behind other large IG focused vendors who possess robust enterprise-class analytics capabilities.

TransPerfect, better known in global ediscovery circles for its language services, legal staffing and court reporting services, has acquired Digital Reef and its hybrid cloud and on-premise information management and governance services and technology which provide ediscovery capabilities such as stand-alone early case assessment (ECA). DR is known for its ability to scale for large Big Data projects and complex legal cases.

Valora provides automated services to support both ediscovery/litigation and large scale records management projects. Valora has developed its own tools to support is services which include auto-unitization of printed documents or faxes, auto-coding where no meta-data exists, automated redaction, translation services, deduplication detection, review, OCR and, ostensibly, any service that more quickly converts paper to ESI.

Venio Systems FRP is an integrated, single source ediscovery solution for processing, culling, analytics review, ECA and production needs. “It has a flexible workflow whereby in one seamless product users can move from one part of the application to another without the hassle of exporting and importing data between multiple products.” Popular with many service providers, FRP is accessed via web-based dashboards.

Viewpointe provides cloud-based multibank infrastructure solutions to various financial institutions. Their OnPointe IG platform enables organizations to manage their content and digital storage via IBM’s private cloud. Services include check archiving, clearing and settlement while helping clients meet regulatory, legal and business requirements for data access, monitoring, retention management and defensible destruction of information.

Williams Mullen is a law firm that helps their clients practice ediscovery and information governance readiness. The firm’s “EDIG” attorneys understand that the growth in ESI can create significant ediscovery burdens. However, effectively managing this information provides an opportunity to conduct litigation more efficiently and effectively as well as delivering substantial benefits and savings throughout the enterprise.

Zetta Discovery is a start-up ediscovery and information governance consulting firm that “leverages vast industry experience and cloud-based technologies to manage Big Data associated with litigation, arbitration and investigation, whether it be around the corner or around the globe.” Zetta looks to help lower the cost of ediscovery by leveraging the cloud and affordable, proven ediscovery technology with partners such as Venio.

ZyLAB delivers “high-quality, modular ediscovery software and services that are tailored to any environment, from serial litigants bringing the process in-house to organizations that need to outsource some of the work for an impending legal deadline. ZyLAB offers a full-scale ediscovery system behind the firewall, a cloud-based platform, and a la carte services with rapid project turnaround.”

Posted in Information Governance, Information Management Best Practices, Information Management Thought Leadership, Information Management Trends | Tagged ABBY, AccessData, akaibu, Amazon, Analytics, Archiving Solutions, Autonomy, BIA, Big Data, C2C, Catalyst, Cicayda, Clearwell, CommVault, Cylance, Daegis, Deloitte, Digital Reef, ediscovery, EMC, Ernst & Young, ESI, Exterro, FTI, Gimmal, Google, Guidance Software, HP, IBM, Index Engines, Information Governance, Information Management, Iron Mountain, kCura, Kofax, Konica Minolta, Kroll OnTrack, Legal and IT, Legal Tech, Microsoft, Mimecast, Mitratech, Nuance, Nuix, OpenText, Oracle, Proofpoint, Rational Retention, Recommind, RenewData, RSD, SAP, SharePoint, StoredIQ, Symantec, Transperfect, Valora, Venio, Viewpointe, Williams Mullen, Zetta Discovery, Zylab | Leave a comment

Parity Research

Why Six Republican U.S. Senators are Right, and Wrong, about HITECH and EHR Interoperability

Performance-Centric Data Storage TCO Study Demonstrates Cost Advantages of Flash Arrays

Real-time Analytics and the Role of the Individual: Major Themes at GigaOM Big Data Event

Information Governance: Rx for Electronic Healthcare Records Interoperability Dilemma

Information Governance Reshaping eDiscovery Landscape: A Major Theme at Legal Tech 2013

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Blog Roll

Meta

Why Six Republican U.S. Senators are Right, and Wrong, about HITECH and EHR Interoperability

Performance-Centric Data Storage TCO Study Demonstrates Cost Advantages of Flash Arrays

Real-time Analytics and the Role of the Individual: Major Themes at GigaOM Big Data Event

Information Governance: Rx for Electronic Healthcare Records Interoperability Dilemma

Information Governance Reshaping eDiscovery Landscape: A Major Theme at Legal Tech 2013

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Social Sites

Information Management Tags

Blog Roll

Meta