The Hidden M&A Risk: Unstructured Data Integration
Unstructured data — files, emails, and legacy systems — can derail integration efforts, introduce compliance pitfalls, and slow down newly combined teams.
Unstructured data — files, emails, and legacy systems — can derail integration efforts, introduce compliance pitfalls, and slow down newly combined teams.

A well-designed schedule not only ensures regulatory compliance but also fosters collaboration with business units, reduces conflicts, and supports automation of classification and disposition processes.

Grow the scope and impact of your records management program by using the people, tools, and resources you already have more efficiently and effectively.

Candid insights into the strengths, limitations, and best practices for using M365 as a records repository.

Everywhere we turn, someone is using a new tool to communicate, and we’re faced with a dizzying array of chats, encrypted messages, video recordings, transcripts from AI tools, prompts and outputs created by generative AI, and a host of other odds and ends. The sheer volume and variety of these formats have made information governance and data retention a far more complicated endeavor than ever before.

A data inventory is critical to managing your information, and if you do business with Minnesotans, it’s now required under Minnesota’s new consumer privacy law, the MNCDPA. A Personal Data Inventory is focused on just the personal information your organization collects, uses, maintains, and shares with third parties, as well as the processes surrounding that activity. As we frequently say to clients, on webinars, and to anyone who will stand still long enough to hear us: “How can you protect it if you don’t know it exists?”

Hoarding isn’t a malicious act. In today’s tech-driven workplace, saving data is nearly effortless. Whether it’s a quick email backup to a personal folder or keeping old project files “just in case,” employees often don’t stop to think about the consequences. Trying to fix the problem with threats or policy reminders rarely works. What’s needed is a thoughtful approach to change management, one that tackles habits and attitudes alongside technical controls.

When organizations come to us looking to implement or update a data retention policy, it’s usually driven by privacy compliance issues. With growing enforcement of global and domestic privacy laws, organizations are under pressure to minimize how long they keep personal information. That’s a good reason to act, but when we dig in, the organization begins to see that privacy isn’t the only consideration, and in many cases, it’s not the most complex.