At ActiveNav, our strength lies not just in our technology but in the people who shape and advance it. That’s why we’re excited to welcome Christian Paschke as our new Product Advisor for Data Discovery.
Christian brings a unique blend of expertise in corporate communications, information governance, and legal data management from her work with Fortune 500 companies. With a career built on guiding organizations through change and ensuring defensible, sustainable approaches to data, Christian’s perspective aligns perfectly with ActiveNav’s mission to eliminate “dark data” and empower organizations to take control of their unstructured content.
In this interview, Christian shares her career journey, what drew her to ActiveNav, and her insights on the evolving landscape of information governance and data intelligence.
You’ve had an interesting career path, from corporate communications and consulting to records and information management. What inspired that shift, and how has your background shaped the way you approach information governance today?
Christian: As a corporate communications practitioner in a heavily regulated industry, I worked closely with the legal department to ensure we shared compliant information and did not create avoidable risk. Over many years, I got a feel for how to best work with the attorneys and an understanding of how they organize and approach their work. When my family moved to Pittsburgh, I decided to pursue work in the legal space. I was lucky to land an information governance role on a Fortune 500 company’s records management and eDiscovery team within the legal department.
Moving people through change is the constant thread throughout my career. In corporate communications, the focus was on getting stakeholders, which included everyone from customers to employees, to think differently about their current situations, try a new way of working, make the switch, then ultimately serve as advocates for change.
Having a background in change management is especially useful in information governance. Shaping how people manage their content to advance your program in impacting business objectives requires moving people through change. It’s a process. You need to understand where people are in the current state, meet them there, and design manageable, iterative approaches to compliance and governance that people want to adopt and sustain. Hitting people with too much change too fast is often disruptive to the business and results in resistance. Approaching change in progressive phases is key to gaining stakeholder trust and support. A well-sequenced information governance roadmap can deliver real business value by securing acceptance and adoption in small steps. Information governance is a marathon, not a sprint.
Why did you decide to join ActiveNav at this point in your career, and what stood out to you about the company’s mission and approach?
Christian: The ActiveNav Cloud platform blew me away. I saw right away it fills a specific gap. ActiveNav Cloud is a powerful resource for solving one of the greatest challenges in information governance: understanding what resides within your unstructured data repositories. It inventories and classifies your unstructured data and organizes this information so that you can take action to extract value from it, mitigate risk, and reduce expenses.
What excites you most about your new role as Product Advisor for Data Discovery at ActiveNav, and what do you hope to bring to the team?
Christian: The most exciting part of being a Product Advisor is learning from our customers. Information Governance practitioners in the legal market are thought leaders in this field. The approaches they are taking to defensibly manage unstructured data throughout its lifecycle are innovative and practical. My role is to understand the challenges our customers face in unstructured data management, how they are addressing them, and what obstacles they face that need better solutions so that we can evolve our platform to better meet their needs.
Everyone at ActiveNav is united in helping our customers achieve a state of Zero Dark Data. We work together collaboratively with a relentless pursuit of empowering our customers to understand and take control of their unstructured data. My colleagues come from a range of backgrounds, and we embrace different perspectives, engage in healthy debate, encourage innovation, and learn from both success and setbacks.
You’ve worked on large-scale information governance programs at a Fortune 500 company. How do those experiences influence your perspective on the challenges organizations face with data discovery and governance?
Christian: My experience shaped my understanding that unstructured data management requires defensibility. Aligning with business objectives requires managing the data through its lifecycle. You cannot defensibly dispose of data unless you know what you have and map it to your policies, retention schedule, and legal hold obligations.
One misperception I’ve heard related to data is that lawyers want to keep all information forever and destroy nothing. That isn’t the case in my experience. Many legal professionals understand and support defensible destruction. These reasons include preventing the over-retention of information to avoid legal risk and regulatory fines, reducing the scale and scope of eDiscovery content, mitigating cyber-threat risk, and improving the compliance and results of AI-assisted technology.
Reporting into the litigation team of a Fortune 500 legal department gave me hands-on, practical experience in defensibly documenting unstructured data deletion and ensuring records and information subject to retention requirements and legal holds are protected and preserved. Whether it was IT-driven projects, like system decommissions and Cloud migrations, or Information Governance-driven initiatives like introducing an M365 content retention procedure and establishing a defensible destruction standard for non-indexed legacy content, the steps were the same. You determine what information you have, whether it is active or inactive, how it relates to your policies and guidelines (for record retention, privacy, information management and disposition, data governance, and customer agreements), its legal hold status, and the action to take. The final step was documenting how you determined what is eligible for defensible destruction, the action that was taken, and who authorized and performed the destruction to provide evidence for future situations ranging from litigation to audits.
For readers who may not be familiar, how do you define data discovery, and why is it such an essential part of managing information today? What are some reasons you think it’s often overlooked or under the radar by organizations?
Christian: Data discovery is the process of inventorying, classifying, and organizing information about your data in a way that allows you to take defensible, documented action to manage it through its lifecycle in compliance with legal, regulatory, business, and customer requirements.
I do not think this process is overlooked by organizations. I also don’t believe it is under the radar. Rather, it is seen as unscalable by many firms because they don’t know where to start. Our growing dependence on email, collaboration, and document creation and management platforms has resulted in terabytes, and in some cases petabytes of unstructured data, accumulated over years and even decades. Some of the people who created this technology left the organization long ago. Storing this mountain of unstructured data blindly is expensive, stifles productivity, introduces avoidable risk, and wastes the untapped value of the good content.
Without technology, the process of reviewing and classifying what data you have is insurmountable. It’s why at ActiveNav we have challenged ourselves to create a methodology for approaching unstructured data discovery that is technology agnostic. There needs to be a standardized approach, based on industry recognized information governance principles, that serves as a roadmap for first defensibly cleaning up undiscovered unstructured data, then monitoring, reporting on, and managing it thereafter throughout its lifecycle. Creating this methodology is thing I’m most excited about because it will help information governance practitioners demonstrate their value to their organizations, while empowering ActiveNav to enhance and evolve our platform to make data discovery easier and more actionable.
How do you see your role contributing to bridging the gap between product development, customer needs, and the evolving regulatory environment around data?
Christian: Understanding our customer’s information governance goals for unstructured data, the obstacles they need to overcome to achieve them, and the workflows they need to create to manage unstructured data will allow ActiveNav to continue evolving our platform to address our customers’ needs and specific use cases. Adapting to changes in the regulatory environment is part of this process. Our platform is configured with standardized rules for locating and classifying sensitive data as defined by General Data Protection (GDPR) requirements, as well as state-driven laws in the U.S. like California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). In addition, it also allows for customization of those rules to reflect additional data elements based on business or regulatory requirements. Lastly, our platform provides actionable and defensible documentation to support regulatory, legal, and audit requirements.
Looking ahead, what trends in information governance or data intelligence do you think will have the most significant impact on organizations in the next few years?
Christian: Preparing data for AI is something we should all be thinking about. Bringing in AI-assisted technology is a significant investment. Getting the most out of this investment requires ensuring the AI is only accessing high quality, compliant data. Duplicates, drafts, and outdated information all impact the accuracy and effectiveness of AI technology. Likewise, feeding AI confidential, sensitive, or restricted information can result in data leaks, compliance issues, and legal risks. Many organizations have unstructured data that accumulated over years, even decades. Taking the time to identify, secure, and actively manage the content AI-supported applications access is a crucial step to responsibly harnessing the power of this technology.
And finally, on a personal note, outside of work, what keeps you inspired and energized? Any hobbies, passions, or fun facts you’d like to share with the ActiveNav community?
Christian: Gardening is how I keep myself active and humble. It’s also a lesson in problem solving. I live in Western Pennsylvania, so gardening involves digging up large rocks and trying to outsmart deer. I’m learning to work with what I’ve got and favor plants that thrive in poor soil, like rain, and don’t create a buffet for the deer. I’d love to hear from anyone living in similar conditions about what’s working well in your yard.
Christian’s insights reflect both the challenges and the exciting opportunities ahead in information governance. As she partners with our customers and teams to shape the future of data discovery, we’re confident her expertise will make a lasting impact.
Want to connect with Christian? Reach out to her on LinkedIn or contact her directly at ActiveNav to continue the conversation on data management or even to swap a few gardening tips.