Gartner PCC Summit 2007 (part 16)

“Keynote High Volumes, High Pressure, High Stakes: Managing the Documentation for the Milosovic Trial” (by Catherine Gerth, Head Archives and Information Management at NATO HQ) at PCC 2007 Summit.

The information exceeded the organization’s ability to manage it with existing processes and technologies. The accused decision to defend himself further complicated things - the boxes just did not fit in his cell. This presentation describes the creation of an eDisclosure portal and how the ICTY worked with vendors to transform its technology and business processes to support eDisclosure.

Another problem is translation problems.

How to disclose load of documents? In boxes? Doesn't fit in the court room and in the prison cell... On CD? How do you handle 53 CD's if you're looking for something? Put every single CD in your computer, search, etc? No. Ok, then DVD's. Doesn't help much either.

Their vendors came up with a solution: a portal. They rescanned 2.5 million documents and OCR-ed it. They had to do it themselves due to security reasons and therefore did it at night, because they were running trials during the trial...
This gave them a way to disclose all the information using access levels. It worked.
However, they ran into problems with lawyers. Many lawyers had a hard time leaving the paper processes. And, the defense attorney’s wanted to load their documents on the portal too.

And that ends my first live blogging experience. I’ll write about this experience soon.