[December 07, 2006] CRM Vendor Autonomy Claims "World First" In Policy Compliance Tweet By David Sims TMCnet Contributing Editor   CRM vendor Autonomy Corporation plc has announced what it claims to be "a world first" in automating processes that guide employees to meet behavior policies and enforce compliance with the introduction of the Aungate Compliance Guidance and Enforcement Module. The new module performs real-time conceptual analyses of enterprise information repositories using Autonomy's IDOL-based Implicit Query technology. These analyses are performed on any form of information -- e-mail, instant messages, documents and voice, what have you -- in order to make granular assessments of whether a user is in danger of violating an external regulation or enterprise policy and a behavioral threshold is about to be reached. If so, the Aungate module launches processes to guide the employee through correct procedures and, depending on enterprise requirements, dynamically point to relevant training material in real-time. This technology is being marketed to organizations "grappling to balance the value and/or risk of an ever-growing amount of unstructured data, while having to set and follow consistent policies and threshold levels to protect the integrity of the business," according to company officials. The system aggregates information from more than 250 repositories in any format, including e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet, audio, video and presentation formats, as well as paper documents. In addition, the system is language independent. It identifies conceptually-related content within e-mail, IM and voice traffic without having to rely on predefined meta-headers, tags or labels to identify meaning. The analysis is performed in real-time without having to access predefined rules and across 100 percent of the available content. Process design capabilities allow businesses to logically map the flow of virtually any compliance process with little or no coding required. This enables business users to define and design processes that involve human and automated tasks, paper and electronic documents, as well as automated notifications and more. And probably most notably, the system automatically re-routes tasks, sends alerts and transparently tracks the status of a process, the time associated with completing each task, and all approvals, reviews and edits. This capability helps to assure auditors, shareholders and regulatory agencies that the proper controls are in place to document and follow processes, and eliminate undocumented exceptions from ever reaching the general ledger. In November Autonomy announced that Verdasys has signed an OEM agreement with Autonomy to integrate the company's Extractor, Profiler and IDOL technologies into Verdasys' flagship product, Digital Guardian. Verdasys products are designed to protect proprietary and sensitive data and the integrity of the business processes. The Digital Guardian platform creates a secure virtual perimeter to assure that data is controlled by policy and monitored for accountability. Verdasys has integrated Autonomy's IDOL platform, as well as its Extractor and Profiler technologies into Digital Guardian's new module, Adaptive Content Inspection. The Autonomy products allow Verdasys to extend Digital Guardian's data protection and business process integrity management capabilities by enabling its Verdasys' customers to search across more than 250 file formats. In October Autonomy announced a multi-million pound contract with the U.K. Government to deploy Autonomy IDOL Server software. Autonomy has collaborated in the past with government, defense and intelligence agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.K. Audit Commission and the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry. David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]