Organizing 20 Years of M&A Activity

Case Study

 

Global Technology Company: Getting a handle on acquired content

Situation

After 20 years of strategic acquisitions, this $40B global technology giant had a significant and growing Information Governance problem.  In addition to acquiring and integrating ever more content, the M&A team was failing governance audits on the proper storage, handling and disposition of sensitive HR information.

Solutions Applied:

AutoClassification

Document Analytics

Electronic File Processing

OCR & Text Extraction

Analytics & Data Mining

Products Used:

PowerHouse

BlackCat

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Challenge

How to organize more than ½ TB of HR and personnel files from over 140 acquired organizations? Each data set had once belonged to a separate company, organized under its own regulations, policies and business needs. How to consolidate information into a single, manageable rubric?  Now that they were all under one roof, often without the knowledge or the people who once created them, this organization needed serious help in commanding their acquired data estate.

Solution

The Information Governance team conducted a Phase 1 Pilot to test solution capabilities against their data and needs. Selecting one large acquisition that resulted in over 40,000 transferred files, the team chose Valora’s PowerHouse AutoClassification Engine and BlackCat Data Dashboard to classify nearly 100 document types, with over 50 rich metadata tags, across 10 distinct record classes. The Valora team custom-configured the software to the client’s exact specifications, creating recognition templates for their unique document and record types, as well as specific workflow rules to map into existing client processes for retention, defensible deletion, legal hold and data privacy.

Results

The result was a fully-tagged, searchable dataset, hosted in a cloud-based, SaaS solution with a “single pane of glass” data dashboard. Upon seeing the results, the team immediately moved forward with a Phase 2 effort to classify and perpetually monitor the acquired content from the other 139 acquisitions.

“Our search and retrieval efforts went from days down to seconds,” explained their head of HR M&A Integration. “Everything we need is right there, with easy-to-use tags and searches. No more having to dig through folders and folders of archived content. Everyone from Legal, to Finance, to Compliance is happy with us. No more failing information compliance audits!”