An actuary is defined as "an adviser on financial questions involving probabilities relating to mortality and other contingencies." So, do you know the old joke about actuaries? No, not the one about how they are accountants who found accountancy too exciting. I mean the one that defines actuaries as the guys who come down from the hills after the battle to kill the wounded to make them easier to classify. Don't laugh. If you are going to protect your organization you are destined to become actuaries.

What got me thinking about this is the issue of electronic discovery (also called, rather irritatingly, e-discovery). Much has been written about this topic over the last few years and many acres of crushed dead trees have been smeared with ink on the subject.

Before I launch into my main thrust let's just look at what e-discovery is all about. Let's say you are a midsize or larger corporation (as you probably are given you're reading Network World) and someone decides to sue you (which given the way the world is today is a question of when, not if).

The claimant contends that whatever it is you are supposed to have done is documented in your corporate data — in your e-mail and files. They can demand you turn over your data as part of the process of finding evidence – the discovery phase — and should you fail to do so in a timely fashion you will face potentially serious fines.

The chaps at StoredIQ, a company that specializes in providing infrastructure for e-discovery, say that, given the high cost of what they call reactive e-discovery — adopting e-discovery processes and policies after someone starts to sue you — more companies are proactivley getting their data ducks in a row in preparation for the inevitable.

Here's the thing: If you take proactive e-discovery to heart, if you view it as a strategic element of your IT plans and as a kind of insurance plan, it doesn't just solve the e-discovery problem, it also sends you down a completely new path of IT thinking.

For a start you have to know exactly and in detail what IT resources you own. Depending on what figures you believe, for roughly half of you that is merely a pipe dream. One survey by PacketTrap Networks found that 54% of respondents had no network management system at all. Without an NMS you can't possibly know what you've got, where it is, what it is doing, or whether it even works.