Life at EMC can be cruel and heartless, take last week for example; I was forced by upper management to attend our annual European Documentum user conference in Monaco. If you have not have the pleasure of spending a week on expenses in somewhere like Monaco then you should make this happen at least once in your life! The location was amazing...the conference was pretty good too.
Let's cut to the chase...the differences in priorities in Europe were noticeable, here are the main things that I noticed:
- Records Management was not their primary focus. They were all much more interested in solutions that pertained to specific regulations rather than the more general retention-focused issues.
- eDiscovery was being handled on a more ah hoc basis. This was not such a surprise given that the threat of expensive litigation is much lower outside of the USA. Most customers expected this to change in the near future.
- SharePoint was not such a focus. This surprised me a bit given that Microsoft have done a good job of marketing SharePoint globally.
My conclusion was that currently companies are focusing their efforts on specific areas and just addressing the minimum number of compliance requirements and not taking a holistic view of the problems. Here's the question then:
Is the US leading the way or over-reacting?
I think that most people believe that the rest of the world are 2 - 4 years behind the US in compliance management. Most people inside of the US that is. Another way of looking at this is that the rest of the world are simply taking a more considered approach to this problem and are not wasting precious resources on unnecessary solutions. I guess that only time will tell who is right!
