Washington Gets E-Discovery Wakeup Call

The U.S. federal government more specifically, the White House – has an e-discovery problem. And what started with questionable email policies looks to have spread to overall backup.

A court filing today reveals there may be gaps in the backup tapes the White House IT shop used to store email. It appears that messages from the crucial early stages of the Iraq War, between March 1 and May 22, 2003, can't be found on tape. So, far from exonerating the White House staffers, the latest turn of events casts an even harsher light on their email policies.

Things are not exactly perfect elsewhere in the federal government, either. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified glaring holes in agencies’ antiquated email preservation techniques. Case in point: printing out emails and storing them in physical files.

What's the problem? Some say IT policies and purchases at the federal level are hampered by bureaucracy. This reduces the number of projects, and it may hinder agencies' ability to procure state-of-the-art solutions.

”Large federal implementations with a lot of stakeholders take a lot of time to get off the ground," says Scott Whitney, vice president of product management at e-discovery specialist Mimosa, which introduced its File System Archiving (FSA) solution today. "Overall, there are federal deals out there, but it isn’t half as often as the state and local implementations."The Electronic Communications Preservation Act, which is still at the bill stage, would place a four-year deadline on agencies to implement electronic record-keeping systems, finally forcing federal organizations to tackle shortcomings in their email strategies.

In the meantime, the feds could do worse than take a look at their state and local counterparts, which are making great strides in e-discovery and even typifying best practices.

Consider the County of Palm Beach, Fla., one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation. The Sunshine State's Sunshine Law gives citizens the legal right to request copies of all public records, so Palm Beach, like other local governments within the state, has had little choice but to grab the e-discovery bull by the horns.

”We do a lot,” admits Santhosh Samuel, server manager for Palm Beach County’s Information Support Services (ISS) office. “Every day we archive, but we only keep 90 days of email in Outlook,” he adds, explaining that email messages are stored in an electronic archive from Mimosa.

With this archive in place, the county has the flexibility to do a number of different searches and can also restore the data to different media. “We can do searches and store them on PDFs, DVDs, whatever we want to do,” says Samuel.Florida isn't alone in setting an example for Washington. A number of other states, including Massachusetts, California, and Arizona, are regarded as trailblazers in their e-discovery efforts.

All this is putting pressure on federal agencies to raise their game. Whether Washington can do so in a timely fashion remains to be seen. Meanwhile, many ITers who don't live in D.C. can find examples of progress closer to home.

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