Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company.
Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious to hear about information management challenges like email management, retention management, or asset data management, this podcast is for you. This is Lee. And in this episode, Moore and I will talk about two aspects of how information is foundational to all businesses.
How do you like that intro? I was really getting into that one more.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: I was gonna say you've been taking, lessons from, I don't know, world WWE announcers or something. Something like that.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Well, I'm really trying here to practice, to be a professional.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Okay.
Amping up the excitement for sure.
And I think this is exciting. So I have. I do have a theme for today. I do have something to talk about around these two aspects. I'm gonna hold. I'm gonna tease it out a little bit longer, but the first. So this is how these thoughts came to me this week. And we've been.
We've been. We have been, you and I, in very high productivity mode for this whole year, really, but in a completely different way from the past 12 years that we've been in business and however many longer years we've been working together.
And the completely different way is we started something new. And we've mentioned it once or twice on this podcast. That's not the focus of this podcast. Even today's episode is not about what we're doing.
But here's where my thought thoughts were going this week.
So we've talked about how we're launching the Trailblazer Learning Academy.
And one of the recent changes is that we decided to make it a separate company and incorporate it.
And I remember when we started Trailblazer Consulting, how we hired a consultant because we believe in consulting to get our checklist of all the things that you have to do to stand up a company.
We followed the list and then we made our own list a few years later because there were more things that we discovered along the way that needed to be done.
So when we decided a few weeks ago that we would incorporate this separate entity, we both went and found those lists because we're good records managers and we had them.
They were foundational documents for our business.
And that's the first theme, is records, which we talk a lot about here, but actual the records of your business that include documentation of the Existence of your business.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: So.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: So, for instance, articles of incorporation, a certificate of incorporation, the acknowledgement from the Secretary of State where you are doing your incorporation, a certificate of good standing. We've mentioned those a few times.
Every company has something like that, whether you're big or small.
And they prove you exist.
They document why you're here. Because you have to put a statement in there about what this business will do, that's important. And then you carry that concept of the records being the evidence, the documentation of the existence of your company. What is it doing, how is it doing it? And there's a ton of examples and we've talked about a lot of them.
They are policies and procedures that document the how.
I've been having these crazy example conversations with you over the past few weeks about, well, what if we were a bakery and we had recipes and those recipes are our standards.
And if you are selling to the public, there's a lot of reason to publish the recipes or at least to publish lists of ingredients or make statements that you can back up about whether you have allergens present in your baked goods, whether you are a gluten free shop or not a gluten free shop, whether you are a nut free establishment or not a nut free establishment.
Because it's not only that there may be regulations that require you to say that, but also your customers want to know.
And so we're not a bakery. Sadly, my life would be so happy if I was just making fun stuff all day.
But we have the same kind of thing. We are not a law firm, but we spend a lot of time doing research, legal research, on retention requirements and, and privacy requirements around data. We advise our clients about it. But we clearly state we're not a law firm.
So we are making them aware of the work we've done of the research. Here are the sources.
And we're also making them aware of how they can depend on what we've said and how they can't.
And a lot of businesses do that. So those records about the how and the why and the what your business is are very, they're very important. They're identifying and they are critical to being able to operate safely and efficiently and effectively and have a foundation for the relationship that you're going to build with your customers or with your partners.
And those, those relationships with your customers and partners then turn into the second element that I wanted to talk about today, which is contracts.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: I see how you did that. Okay.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: There was a method to this madness. Yes.
So the contract side of the record keeping is we all, we've talked a lot about its, you know, rights and interest. It's documenting obligations between you and your customer or you and your supp.
And that's true.
But this week you and I were lucky enough to attend the association of Corporate Counsel and there was a lot of discussion about contracts and contract management and different ways to approach that. And in the past few months we've been looking at that a lot, ever since we were at the ACC's legal ops conference last spring.
Because there's a huge rush. I feel like there's a huge rush maybe with, maybe it's been there for a while and we're just getting caught up in it of contract lifecycle management, software companies moving into the AI space and the gen AI space and even the agentic AI space.
And it shows up in many different ways.
So the contract at its heart is about the relationship between your company and another entity.
It's about the guardrails that you have agreed to and that you're putting in place to protect yourself and your own company, but also to protect the other company.
So that you're not expecting the supplier to. You can't just keep changing what you told.
Let's try that again.
So that you make an order from the supplier and you document it. Because otherwise what's to prevent you from saying oh, I didn't say green, I meant Hazel, I need you to redo this or oh.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Or receiving something completely different from.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Or receiving something completely different. So the contract and the guardrails really protect both sides of the agreement.
And they describe what's going to happen, what service is going to be provided, what goods are going to be provided, what activity are the two groups going to undertake together and if there's compensation, it talks about that, it talks about responsibility and liability if something goes wrong, talks about ending the agreement.
So even an agreement like a non disclosure agreement between two companies that want to talk about a possible future together, a possible joint venture or possible exchange, they want to be able to share confidential information, they want to be able to talk openly and they want to protect their secrets though they want to make sure that if this doesn't work out that the other company can't just take what they learned and run away with it. And that sharing information that's not widely known, it's protected.
So you want an end to that. You want to know what is the penalty if it, if somebody breaches that confidentiality. You want to know if they, if what's the penalty if it Is a data breach that's out of, out of somebody's control, not an intentional breach, what's the penalty? But also what's the response? And then when does it end?
So these, the crafting of a contract is important.
That's not news. We've talked about that before. The piece that came to me this week is the relationship between the record keeping and the contracts.
Because both of them provide a view into the business.
They provide a view of who we are and what we do and how we do it. And then, especially if you're looking at revenue contracts, contracts where the company is supposed to make some money, you get a different view of how's it going. Like you have an accounting view, right, of money in money out, cash flow.
But in the contract space you also get a view of is there more you could do?
Are you held to a certain fee structure.
And we see this a lot in our energy clients, they might have a power purchase agreement that they put in place when they were starting out. And the fee structure is subject to periodic increases or decreases, somewhat disconnected from the market or maybe not. Maybe it is connected to the market.
We just worked with a client in midstream where there were a lot of ties to consumer price indexes and other price indexes and fluctuating fees based on the market changes as opposed to a fixed fee or a predetermined rate.
Sometimes contracts hide things from you or your contract management solution doesn't help you find those things.
For instance, document storage companies you might have a three year contract with built in escalation of cost and then a shift to a month to month activity, a month to month billing arrangement where the cost can continually go up. And until somebody has the time to go and focus on that, they may not notice the change and you may have missed a window to renegotiate and have to start over.
We've seen that happen too.
So the records and the contracts, the descriptive and documentary evidence of what your business is and does, the guardrails and the agreement, that's the description of the agreements in place. And then two different views into your business and how it goes. I think these two sets of information, whether they're documents or data, doesn't matter.
It's the structure of it, the fact that it exists and the view that you get as a business owner into your business through these two things that I think gives you a holistic picture.
I'm going to stop there. And then I have one closing thought taking us back to that AI question.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: That was good. That was informative. So I'm good.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: And you didn't know what I was going to say?
[00:12:41] Speaker B: No, I was honing in on every word.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Just like our audience, learning as we go.
So circling back to the AI, I think that there is a lot of hype out there about AI. There are also many different tools that come under the sort of generic category of it's an AI tool and there's a place for them in record keeping and in contract management.
And what's important is understanding what data is this AI looking at, how is it going to be used in the next step? So one thought that I've been toying with all week is you're a large older company and you have a lot of legacy documents or data in different databases, point solutions, or in native document format, paper document format or image PDF format.
And there's connections across those things, logical connections. There's references to the physical assets that might be generating revenue, there's references to capital expenditures to build things. There's references to business units or to counterparties or customers.
But because it's been created in such a different, you know, such a sort of scattered fashion over the years, different databases, different documents, different materials, it's very hard for a person to see the through line.
It's not hard as in we don't know how to do it. It's hard because there's so many different places to look and nobody has that kind of time.
To me, that feels like a great experiment, a great place to look for an AI assistance. For AI assistance, I guess, because something that AI is really good at is parsing through a lot of data.
And you need to tell it.
What's the logic here?
What does it. We have, we have numbered accounts over here and we have names over here. And how do those things fit together to actually get us to a full picture?
The other side of it is we.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: Have.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: Operational data or performance data and we might be looking for trends. And again, this is about the ability of an AI tool to parse and analyze and perform different statistical analyses or trends or extrapolations on data based on pattern matching and other things. So there's a lot of opportunities.
When I hear a software vendor say it's magic, I feel very skeptical.
But knowing if we start with this foundation of we have records and they describe our business, what it is, why it is and how we do things. We have contracts that describe the relationships with from our business to the outside world. Between those two things, we have all the data we need to inform an AI tool and program it.
It's probably not the right word, but it's an evocative word. Tell it what we are looking for and tell it what it's looking at in order to give us reliable results.
So that's a topic I want to explore in the coming months. I don't have any. I don't have any more to say about it today, but I wanted to throw that out there works.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: I have some ideas. So.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: Great.
Great.
We'll have another one of these where I learn from you in real time.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: There you go.
If you have any questions, please send us an email at infoailblazer.us.com or look us up on the web at www.www.trailblazer.us.com or at our learning academy, which is www.trailblazer learningacademy.com.
thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake who created our music.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Thanks everyone. See you soon.
