Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2015-01-19 19:00:00Format, images and links may no longer function correctly.
Every Monday night, almost the weekly eDJ digest fires out to roughly 6,000 members. I expect to clean out 2-10 dead email addresses every Tuesday morning, not a bad rate for such a volatile industry. Occasionally I get a burst of dead addresses from a single company, which I interpret as a potential indicator of layoffs, downsizing or other M&A activity. As our industry increasingly uses analytics to spot changes in trends, chronological email gaps and other indirect evidence, we should remember the hard lessons learned by criminal prosecutors who have relied entirely on circumstantial evidence and inference. While bursts of bad addresses have previously enabled me spot layoffs by Recommind, I could not find anything on the web to explain the eight email addresses from DTIGlobal.com that went bad in the last week. Maybe their email administrator finally killed off inactive accounts or they migrated to Office 365 (like most of my corporate clients) over the holiday weekend. It definitely got me thinking about how our focus on analytics, trend spotting and indirect evidence can lead us down the wrong path if we do not validate leads with hard, direct evidence.
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. His active research topics include analytics, mobile device discovery, the discovery impact of the cloud, Microsoft’s 2013 eDiscovery Center and multi-matter discovery. Recent consulting engagements include managing preservation during enterprise migrations, legacy tape eliminations, retention enablement and many more. Blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment.