Two posts in one!  As many of you know by now, I’m writing a weekly blog post for Ipro’s blog to supplement the excellent educational content that Jim Gill and the Ipro team regularly provide!  But, this week, in addition to referencing my weekly post, I’m also touching on a post that Jim wrote a few days ago about Zoom recordings!

Business Stakeholders

First things first.  Today’s weekly blog post for Ipro’s blog concludes a new six(!) part series started last month on considering the five stakeholder groups of EDRM’s Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM). The past four weeks, I’ve reviewed Legal stakeholders, Records and information management (RIM) stakeholders, Information Technology (IT) stakeholders and Privacy & Security stakeholders. 

This week, I conclude the series by focusing on the Business stakeholders. Let’s face it – in the IGRM model (as the white paper issued by EDRM regarding the release of IGRM v3.0 illustrates), business stakeholders are primarily responsible for one thing – profit.  As a result, business stakeholders are very invested in using information that enables the organization to drive up profits overall and they are users of the information that drives the business and determines the success of the business.  Unless you’re a non-profit, no profits equals no organization and no other stakeholder groups needed to govern information. So, the business stakeholders drive much of the information that needs to be governed within an organization.

So what are examples of business stakeholder units and how do they fit into the organization?  And, how do business stakeholders relate to the other stakeholder groups and how can they help the organization achieve better information governance?  You can find out on Ipro’s blog here.  Don’t worry, it’s just one extra click!  :o)

Zoom Recordings Discovery

This week, you get references to two blog posts on the Ipro blog.  The other one was written by Jim last week (“I’ve Downloaded the Recording, Now What?” 3 (More) Considerations Regarding Zoom and eDiscovery) and (as the title indicates) discusses additional considerations regarding Zoom and eDiscovery (to go with others he wrote about back in March here).  This time, Jim talks about Long Term Storage Costs (because audio and video files take up a lot of space), Establishing Retention Policies (more important than ever, considering the challenges associated with discovery of audio and video files) and eDiscovery Processing Capabilities.  Definitely important considerations and Jim provides some great information regarding them.

Regarding the latter, of course, I was part of the ACEDS webinar a couple of weeks ago (recording available here) with Brett Burney, Principal of Burney Consultants LLC and Ashley Griggs, Director of Legal Markets at NICE – Nexidia and the Digital Detectives podcast last week with Sharon Nelson and John Simek interviewing Brett and me (available here), so feel free to check those out.

Here’s one additional consideration about saved Zoom recordings – the audio is actually saved twice (at least, in cases I’ve seen).  The video of the meeting is saved as an MPEG-4 video file format (mp4 file extension) which can be played with Windows Media Player, QuickTime, and other MP4 players and certainly includes the audio along with the video.  However, the audio of the meeting is also saved again as an MPEG-4 audio file format (m4a file extension).  Zoom also saves out a media playlist file (m3u file extension) as well.  The results of a recording look something like this when stored on your local drive:

As you can see, Zoom doesn’t really provide any meaningful metadata about the meeting itself other than when the meeting was recorded (even though you probably titled the meeting when an invite was sent), so it may be good to add a step to rename the mp4 or m4a (or both) files to something meaningful to identify the meeting that was recorded.  And, the mp4 can be seven to ten times the size of the m4a file, so that can factor into retention considerations.  Depending on the contents and importance, perhaps keeping both copies long term isn’t necessary.  Something to consider, along with the considerations Jim provided in both of his posts!

So, what do you think?  Does your organization have a fully developed InfoGov program involving all five stakeholder groups?   Does it include a plan for addressing Zoom meeting recordings?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the authors and speakers themselves, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.