Autonomy has launched Autonomy Information Governance (AIG), a software that can understand in real-time the meaning of email, blogs, and other documents. It can flag illegal communications and also find documents related to a lawsuit against the company, and also destroy documents that don’t require to be saved yet could raise the risk of a successful future legal action against the company.

Autonomy has been in the content management, knowledge management space long before it even was discussed in enterprises. I have watched this co closely since the pre-dot-com days and they have come out many a times, ahead of competitors, with some very intelligent products. I think this becomes a lot more relevant with the compliance scare of SOX. Would be interesting to watch how the industry takes it.

“Human nature is not going to change because of the Internet,” said Michael Lynch, CEO and founder of Autonomy. “Technology has made it easier for some people within a company do a lot of damage.” He cited the recent case of a French trader who lost billions of dollars in unauthorized trades, and the loss of data on every child in Britain by a UK government agency.

The AIG software has several uses. Customers set the policies they are required by law to enforce and the software monitors compliance in real-time.

This includes inappropriate communications via email or instant messaging. For example, it can warn the user not to send an email because it contains illegal communications, or it is in violation of one of many corporate governance rules in its sector.

Another use for AIG is in e-discovery. When a corporation is sued, it often has just 90 days to produce huge quantities of documents, emails, etc, related to the lawsuit. It faces huge fines if it doesn’t meet the deadline. The software understands the meaning of documents and can reveal which documents should be reviewed by lawyers.

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