Bubblegum and paperclips fail to impress

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 16 March 2011 10:26

Companies which relay on simple keyword search to find information in terabyte scale corporate databases will land themselves in hot water with regulators according to one of the world's leading data management experts. The 'bubblegum and paperclip' systems that many companies develop themselves to try and help find corporate data to keep regulators and lawyers happy won't solve the problem according to Tom Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer of Open Text.

Mr Jenkins, who was visiting Sydney this week, said that in the last 15 years 100,000 new company regulations have been unveiled. Not only are they more prescriptive about what information is available - but also when it is made available.

He said the Basel regulations (I, II and the currently proposed Basel III) which regulate international financial organisations were a good example of the trend. 'Under Basel I transactions would be counted and tallied. For Basel II you had to make calculations on a daily basis.  Basel III requires instantaneous calculations.'

Open Text is a content management specialist which has delivered systems to Australian organisations such as Challenger Financial, Rio Tinto, the Ten Network and the Queensland Government. Internationally its technology has been used to manage the information flows for the G20 economic meetings.

But according to Mr Jenkins; 'The pace at which information is being made available is running out ahead of our regulatory grasp of the speed at which things can be done. Derivatives trading and quant programmes are so far ahead of where the regulations are.

'In America much of the (financial sector) regulations were written in 1933. That's the challenge with a lot of the regulatory environments and the litigation environments - that the challenge we have is not just the huge amount of content - but the pace at which it is shared.'

He said that; 'The reaction to all the regulatory issues has been 'oh I'll just save it all'. Happily what has occurred is that memory costs have come down so dramatically that one can afford to do that. Where one gets into difficulty is complying with the regulation or complying with the e-discovery in litigation.

'Now you have to find it and there's where the dilemma lies. If organisations are simply blindly storing all this information and sitting back and saying 'I've complied' - well they haven't. You have to be able to find the information and simple search engines will not find that information.

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