See what I did there?  ;o)  Anyway, EDRM is currently conducting a survey about the state of data mapping in organizations and needs your help!

To help them develop the next stages of their Data Mapping project, and make sure their effort is being put into achieving the most useful goals, they’ve launched this data mapping survey to understand exactly how data mapping is used by the EDRM community, and what resources would be most helpful.

For those of you who don’t know, Data Mapping is the process of:

• identifying an organization’s data sources which may hold documents relevant to an issue or issues; and
• understanding how those data sources are stored, structured, managed and accessed;
• how those data sources and the data are used within the organization;
• who is responsible for managing those data sources; and
• the applicable retention and back-up practices and policies for the data sources.

I’ve been a big proponent of data mapping over the years and wrote about it several times early in my blogging days.  I’ve revisited that topic recently on the Ipro blog – here and here.

One catalyst for the Data Mapping project is to document community standards around data mapping in response to the Senior Executive Accountability Regime (SEAR) in Ireland.  The project is being led by Rachel McAdams and Eoghan Kenny from A&L Goodbody in Dublin. In addition to SEAR, challenges ranging from BIG Data to increased emphasis on compliance with strengthened data privacy laws to the expansion of remote workforces during the pandemic have made data mapping more important than ever for an organization to effectively govern information to support these various additional information demands.  Not to mention that it’s always been one of the best things you can do for litigation preparedness.

The survey, available here, is comprised of 16-17 questions and literally takes 1-2 minutes to complete (I know, because I just did it).  Please consider taking the survey ASAP as it may be open for only a few more days!

So, what do you think?  Does your organization have a program for data mapping?  Please: 1) take the survey(!) and 2) 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 author, 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.