| Legal Compliance
In the past, information management was generally seen as a mundane, backroom activity that had little general relevance to the overall strategic aims of the company; at best, a necessary but uninteresting cost center.
This has changed dramatically in recent years. A spate of high profile cases -- the tobacco litigation, the Microsoft Ant-trust suit, the class-action suit against the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Enron-Arthur Andersen scandal and many others -- have made information management a high-profile, high stakes legal issue.
This headline grabbing aspect of information management is only the most visible part of information management's legal aspects. Like an iceberg, it has many other aspects which lurk below the surface of newspaper headlines, and which can have important consequences for the unwary;
- There are many thousands of laws, state and federal, on the books requiring information to be collected and maintained
- There are thousands of privacy laws governing the use and misuse of personal information collected by businesses and other organizations
- There are cutting edge legal issues such as electronic signatures and e-commerce which profoundly affect information capture and storage decisions
- Jurisdictional and other time-honored legal doctrines have been shattered by the boundary-crossing nature of the Internet and e-commerce
All of these combines to create a highly complex and highly fluid legal climate centered on information and its management. The forward thinking organization will take this climate into central consideration when developing its information strategies and turning them into organizational policy.
PelliGroup is a leader in tracking and analyzing this complex landscape and offering solutions that protect an organization's interests while moving it forward in its goals. | | |