Lead Software Architect at Mercedes-Benz Group AG - IT Communication & Legal
Our ITG/CL department has the Information Officer (IO) function for
more than 10 different departments within Mercedes-Benz
headquarters. Our Center of Competence (CoC) IT eDiscovery,
Corporate Data Protection &
ISO, together with other teams, looks after the Integrity and Legal
(IL) board department with a focus on electronic discovery,
information privacy, and corporate security.
The implementation of my tasks and those of our team also takes
place in close coordination with other IT support teams for IL. In
addition, our team also has responsibility for the Information
Security Officer (ISO) functions at headquarters, as well as the
Information Security Architect (ISA) function at ITP.
As lead software architect within ITG/CL, I act
as an intermediary between
internal and external stakeholders and use my IT expertise to
support our departments in the business analysis, the development of
solution concepts and the specification of technical requirements
and, as technical lead, coordinate planning, implementation and
operation of new and ongoing IT projects. My tasks in the team are
performed in coordination with the technical strategy of the
respective department or the overarching corporate IT strategy. At
the same time, I provide active input to my team for the
digitization of departmental processes and point out improvements
and opportunities in the digital working world of
Mercedes-Benz.
I also ...
- deal with supplier management, Local Compliance Officers (LCOs) for the digitization of the Records of Processing Activities (RoPAdigital)1. My duties include 1) coordination of IT topics including budget management, procurement of infrastructure and information security topics, 2) design of interactions between RoPA and other relevant IT tools, 3) elaboration of requirements into our existing IT landscape, and 4) outline technical requirements, APIs and procurement of the application.
- support various investigation processes within the scope of the corporate Forensics Center in cooperation with the corporate security team and the investigating units (including CA, Legal, HR). In this context, as IT Case Manager, I act as the central coordination function within the global IT and ensure that necessary data is secured and made available worldwide in a legally required manner.
- ensure the operation of the Custodian Administration Tool (CAT)2 in the eDiscovery IT landscape. In particular, the implementation of the necessary flagging of the custodians in the directory as well as the automated communication with the custodians to ensure compliance with legal requirements on my own responsibility.
- provide technical specifications (patching of the IT landscape, as well as access protection). If required, I also support other project managers in their project for a successor solution of the current legal and corporate data privacy software.
- establish further development of the internal eDiscovery and data protection IT landscape including forensic hardware and software with my colleagues.
- prepare presentations for top management and create (technical) software documentations for cooperating business units.
- take on the role of Information Officer and CISM Service Manager in our department.
Achievements
- As technical owner, I supported the 2021 company-wide Automated Data Deletion3 including more than 330 entities worldwide. I successfully pushed and managed the implementation of the central Exception Management Tool (AVT)4 for our Corporate Data Protection (CDP) team.
- Thanks to the can-do attitude and goal-driven work with colleagues from Corporate Security, I was able to roll-out our Forensic Management System (eForensics)5 in only 2.5 months from start to production. I am glad that together with the business unit we mastered the project in such a short time with all the hurdles and were able to go live as planned in November 2021.
- In order to validate my proficiency in eDiscovery, adding more value to our organization, and distinguish myself in the industry, I successfully attended trainings in case administration, processing, active learning and analytics with Relativity6.
- I successfully pitched my project to our CIO and the works council.
- More to come. :)
2 Custodian Administration Tool (CAT): End-to-end management tool of custodian related activities.
3 Experience shows that data in companies is often stored for indefinite periods and is never deleted if there is no regulation limiting the storage period. Often, much of this data is no longer needed or rapidly becomes obsolete. This leads to a continuous increase in the total volume of data stored on the servers as well as an increase in costs – not only due to the storage capacity required but also to data management. The huge amount of data also interferes with performance of the IT systems and efficient workflows. Furthermore, in the case of personal data, data protection regulations – such as the EU’s GDPR – require that such data may only be stored as long as is necessary for the respective purpose.
4 Ausnahmeverwaltungstool (AVT): Successor of the group-wide data retention to manage the retention process (identification of fileshares and SiteCollections (SharePoint) and requesting exceptions). AVT is a .NET tool, partly hosted as Application Consolidation (ApCos) Microsoft Service.
5 Forensic Management System (eForensics): Python-based (Django framework) application hosted as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). eForensics is used for managing and documenting of IT forensic investigations, as well as collections and imaging of evidence items.
6 Relativity is a complete eDiscovery platform that helps legal teams solve complex data problems during litigation, investigation, and compliance projects. It comes with a set of tools executing on each step of the process on-premise and in the cloud.
