I missed this story on Friday, but the Globe & Mail (and I’m sure many other sources) reported that new federal litigation rules in the U.S. went into effect Friday whereby emails, instant messages and all other electronic “documents” must be maintained by corporations and available for legal discovery. This includes things such as the contents of removable memory cards, work-related pictures on your cell phone and pretty much anything else that you do on an electronic device. This isn’t hugely different than some of the existing compliance requirements, but apparently has a much broader scope in terms of content.
Compliance is one of those areas where content and process overlap significantly: the content is what has to be maintained for compliance purposes, but BPM is often used to route and track the content through the compliance process.