Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2012-08-20 09:00:11  It can be easy to forget that there are adjacent markets that, to some extent, overlap with or envelop eDiscovery.  One such market is Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC).   The other day, a message from a former Forrester Research colleague of mine – Michael Rasmussen, now of Corporate Integrity – reminded me of the overlap of GRC and eDiscovery.  Michael views GRC as “an approach to business – an approach that permeates the organization: its oversight, its processes, its culture, and its boundaries.”From eDJ’s perspective, GRC exists as a separate market category from eDiscovery, even though there is significant overlap between some of the solutions.  Because GRC software evolved from applications that were specific to Sarbanes-Oxley, GRC has traditionally been thought of in the context of marrying Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems with the unstructured content that is related to compliance.  Some eDiscovery systems are connected to ERP systems (e.g. Legal Hold applications), but many are not yet.  The phone call I received from Michael, though, reminded me that eDiscovery and GRC are on a path to convergence.eDiscovery comes up in Michael’s research and GRC comes up in eDJ’s research.  While we believe these will remain distinct buying categories for the foreseeable future, we also expect that vendors from both spaces will merge together to create broader solutions that can address “governance.”  We have written before about the evolution from eDiscovery to Information Governance (IG); that evolution should marry together elements of GRC, too.  What will the uber-category be named?  It could be IG, GRC, or simply Governance – that remains to be seen.  What is clear, though, is that a single company infrastructure should be able to enable all of the activities within the umbrella.Michael is running a survey focused on eDiscovery and it would be great to have the eDJ audience participate in it.  We will share the results in a future post.  Click here to take the survey.eDiscoveryJournal Contributor – Barry Murphy

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