News Release: June 23, 2008

DONNELL SYSTEMS ADVOCATES USING INFORMATION WISELY

Those are issues that concern managers and lawyers, not the IT staff, which sometimes prefers to keep everything in the database just in case it might need to retrieve something. “What has happened is corporations have been in lawsuits and their database has been discovered,” mined by opposing attorneys for damaging evidence, Donnell says.

Questionable language or facts that show up out in the database, out of their historical context, can be more dangerous than documents that show exactly how they were used and when.

The new concept also allows for destruction of information on legally-permitted or company-chosen schedules, such as how long to keep the records of a manufacturing process.

The same document might include some material that has to be kept forever (such as a hospital patient’s name), some that must be kept three months (such as a memo), and some that must be kept seven years (such as tax information). Donnell’s system can manage each kind of information and apply an accepted retention policy to schedule discard at the proper time.

The system’s DataDigger® tool can then pull data from the Fixed Content. For example, DataDigger can extract discrete bits of data from a hospital report – such as a patient’s name that must be kept forever and the services and charges pertaining to a certain stay that must be kept for seven years – and use them to create separate information.

“You can preserve what you want and only what you want,” Adams says.

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