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Can You Look It Up?

Think it's hard to find something in your swollen E-mail inbox? Imagine searching through your company's entire archive.

January 1, 2009

"Discovery" sounds exciting, unless you're talking about legal discovery. In that case, it becomes a bureaucratic nightmare as you pore through electronic records and paper documents in an effort to satisfy the demands of lawyers. That's far from a rare occurrence: according to Osterman Research, nearly 40 percent of 130 companies it surveyed last September had been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee E-mail in the past 12 months. The median time for fulfilling a single data-retrieval request from backup files is eight person-hours, Osterman found. The cost quickly adds up; some companies have actually settled lawsuits rather than conduct a lengthy E-mail discovery. Read more...

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Rethinking the Dining Experience

Readers write to tell us how restaurant chains should prepare for the future; that one model for allocating future funds stands above others; that companies are disproportionately focused on cutting travel expenses and head count; and more.

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