Every one of us would likely choose convenience over complexity when it comes to expensive, complicated, and highly technical tasks. Example: “Alexa, what’s the weather going to be tomorrow?”

We don’t think about the machines, people and process that go into delivering that information to our ears. Numerous software, hardware, and years of education go into delivering the weather, but we consume the results very casually. That’s because we’ve built confidence in the delivery of that information. Daily, automatically, and most importantly, transparently.  

What Alexa represents really, is middleware. She’s our interface to this amazing world of meteorology and cloud whisperers. But you can ask Alexa just about anything. So, she’s really a middleware layer to knowledge.  Just give her an input, and she’ll try to come up with an answer.  

What if we thought about other problems this way? Design a middleware application that gathers, collects, organizes, and delivers information based on specific inputs. And what if we thought about the interconnected ecosystems of Information Governance, eDiscovery and Investigations through that lens? What we’d all want, is a single place to control all of these systems and workflows.    

That would be one mighty piece of middleware. It would certainly have to have at least the following… 

• Enterprise Authentication (Active Directory and AzureAD) 
• External Database Support (SQL, Postgres) 
• Legal Hold with Self Collect 
• Robust API access  
• Webhooks to trigger applications 
• Multi-Source Collections  
• Automated Job Triggering and Processing 
• Automatic Uploads to Review  
• Metrics that track every step of the way. 

Perhaps it’s time to ask less of your legal hold, collection or processing software and start asking more from your middleware?