Five Best Practices to Enable Records Management

"There is a significant changeover occurring in the architecture of records management solutions away from a separate records repository to in-place records management. The primary advantage of the move to in-place records management is to maintain the system of record and simplify implementation."—"Records Management Architecture's Dramatic Shift," Forrester Research, June 2004

Records management (RM) is top-of-mind for many large organizations worldwide. This is partly because the benefits of having a single, central console for managing the retention of documents (e.g., email, IM, Microsoft Office files, PDFs, Web content) in multiple repositories are clear. These benefits include cost savings associated with discovery and storage, and lower risk associated with having a common set of policies applied to all electronic content in an organization.

Another—and equally prevalent—reason that RM is a hot button for IT executives is that it has many moving parts that are confusing and highly difficult to execute. Many CIOs have taken steps to enact an RM strategy and found that they have been undermined by changing requirements or overcome by trying to deploy what some consider a "boil the ocean" strategy that requires buy-in by too many constituents to achieve in a timely manner.

The truth is: an RM strategy doesn't have to be that complicated. By phasing in key building blocks that are flexible enough to evolve as requirements change, success can be much more attainable than it might seem. By building an RM system from the foundation up (vs. starting from the top) with components that can solve real problems today and can be easily modified to meet future requirements, an organization can more efficiently achieve its RM objectives.

This article provides a list of best practices that will help an organization take a practical first step toward achieving success with its RM strategy. Once complete, you will understand that a fundamental building block to your strategy is deploying a content archiving solution as a cornerstone. But buyer beware: not all content archiving solutions are equal. Some archiving solutions do not provide the flexibility needed to allow you to change course when requirements change. Still others expose your organization to significant corporate risk by copying records to multiple applications that may or may not be disposed of at the right time. The smart choice for a message and file archiving solution will provide your organization with fundamental retention management capabilities within the product and also allow your organization to extend this functionality to help you build a solid foundation for your enterprise RM initiative.

The Five Best Practices

1. Start with your most important content first.

Executing an RM strategy is complicated and requires the buy-in from many different constituents in order to be successful. In many cases, these strategies are set back by trying to do too much too quickly. Instead of trying to build an RM solution from the top down, many organizations construct it with best-of-breed applications from the bottom up—starting with addressing their most important content first.

Of all the content in your organization, what is the "most important"? The answer probably isn't a surprise. Email and files represent 75% of all corporate intelligence.1 Add to this the fact that US organizations spent a total of $5.8 billion to analyze emails for discovery purposes in 20052 and that several million-dollar fines have been levied against corporations in the past few years for failure to capture, preserve and produce email—and it becomes clear that email and files are the most important electronic content to an organization.

The primary benefit of starting with archiving email and files as the first step in a phased approach is that it is much easier and more cost-effective to implement than a corporate-wide RM system. By capturing and preserving email today with an archiving solution (vs. saving them to backup tapes), an organization will have a much better idea what data it has in email and files—much more quickly. Why does this matter? Courts and regulatory bodies are getting more and more stringent about when data must be produced. For instance, the Supreme Court recently stated that starting December 1, 2006, a party that has been issued a discovery request must come to the first meeting having all the information in hand (and that the first meeting must take place within 14 days of the request). Having all relevant data indexed and easily available will help ensure that opposing counsel can't ask for an exorbitant amount of information to force a settlement.

2. Use the right application for the right problem.

Now that you've decided to build your RM system from the foundation up (starting with email and files), you must now turn your attention to identifying the content archiving solution that is best suited to be a key building block for your strategy.

Start with an application that is designed to handle the large volume of email and files that are created each day. Applications like ECM—or even RM—may on the surface seem appealing for this task because they are designed to manage electronic documents throughout their lifecycle. But these applications are made for much smaller volumes of data than what an organization generally creates with email and files—in many cases, a million messages and attachments a day. These applications also take much longer to implement, leaving an organization susceptible to discovery requests in the interim. Further, ECM applications are generally not the right fit for the problem because they often require an organization to create a second copy of email and files to be stored (increasing corporate risk) or force users to swap between tools during the workday