Peggy Zagelow - a view from the lab

From archive: September 2008

What if you had to produce all relevant emails?

PeggyZ 3,254 Views

I think that most of you reading this work for large companies, and our U.S. large companies tend to have pretty active legal departments. One of the hot topics these days around litigation is the investigation of email to answer legal requirements for evidence. Yep, they're likely keeping all of your email, and are required to comply when asked to provide the relevant ones as part of a lawsuit. Getting that set right is a big deal.

Now, I'm not a lawyer. I do happen to come from a family of lawyers, but that's not really here nor there for this discussion. The group where I work in IBM's Information Mangement has just produced a pretty cool part of the eDiscovery puzzle. It's called eDiscovery Analyzer. As you can see in the announcement letter, it works in conjunction with other IBM products to analyze email content in a repository.

The cool part is what's under the hood here. Based on the open, unstructured information management architecture-based search and text analytics (known as UIMA to those who know and love it), this product processes the text inside as well as the associated information about all the emails. This processing in turn allows a legal email analyzer person to work with and filter based on extracted entities from the email, such as people and company names, and stuff like sender, recipient and date. Combine that with powerful free-text search and you really have some amazing capability to categorize, gather, flag... this really helps a legal staff when they're asked to provide exactly what's needed and no more.

Now... what if you had this kind of capability on other information besides legal email repositories in your enterprise. What would you do with it? What other business problems could this kind of technology solve for you?

[Read More]

This Wednesday, Oct 1 -- be part of the community

PeggyZ 3,415 Views

Some of my IBM colleagues have created a pretty cool idea - that we, the community of folks with an interest in IBM's information management technology, should designate a day to connect virtually online. This means not just reading content, but actually taking a step further and participating.

I've always seen online social networking tools as extensions of what is done better in person, and a pretty good substitute for when it's just not practical to be in person. This goes back years and years, to online forums, prodigy (remember that?), etc. If you think of your participation online as much like an in-person event as you possibly can, you'll benefit the most possible.

Say, for example, if you attended a talk at a conference, and you gained a lot of useful knowledge from it, and then found your self face-to-face with the speaker right afterwards, you'd say "thanks, I learned a lot from your talk". And if you were sitting at lunch and someone said "Do you know anyone here who can help me with an SQL issue", you'd point them across the room to where your favorite SQL expert sat. Or, you'd do your best to answer the SQL issue yourself.

What we're thinking is that perhaps if we picked a day and asked everyone to speak up in just one small way, we might get some folks more comfortable with participating online, and everyone would benefit - make some contacts, get some questions answered, reconnect with someone you met in person, etc.

So, this Wednesday October 1, get out there to your favorite Information Management online sites and find a way to speak up. There are more ideas and links mentioned here.[Read More]

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