Get Going with Electronic Records Management

Many regulations and guidelines are driving compliance initiatives in the enterprise, from Sarbanes-Oxley, to the FDA's 21 CFR Part 11, to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Senior management in corporations and institutions has spent a staggering amount on high-profile initiatives such as risk assessment, continuity planning and information cataloging via corporate taxonomies. By some estimates, the average corporation spent $4.5 million to meet just one part of Sarbanes-Oxley (Section 404) in 2004. Amidst all this spending, funding for electronic records management (ERM) initiatives has lagged. In an ARMA survey published in 2004, 87% of respondents stated that Sarbanes-Oxley had NOT resulted in an increased budget for RM.

Even when funding is committed, there are still significant hurdles to overcome before benefits can be realized—hurdles that can sometimes cause the entire project to grind to a halt:

• Too many stakeholders—Conflicts of opinion and priority amongst IT, records managers and C-level executives, as well as the departments generating the content can stall or kill deployments.

• Time to deployment—Promises of availability of the RM solution can often be wildly optimistic, resulting in disillusionment and loss of confidence.

• Unforeseen costs—Many activities, such as setting up automated rules and processes for getting content into the ERM system, can take a lot of time and require a lot of costly, outsourced services. This can put some initiatives on hold until additional funding has been secured.

• Slow adoption—Staff may be reluctant to learn radically new processes and can slow or halt implementation before it even gets started. In other instances, high-priority areas such as legal and finance have significantly influenced the overall requirements, resulting in other departments feeling like the company is covered and is therefore less interested in supporting an ERM deployment.

• Balkanization—IT often feels they own the solution's infrastructure and content but typically thinks of compliance as "someone else's job." RM teams might understand managing paper records for compliance, but may be uncomfortable taking the lead in shaping ERM technologies and processes.

• No champion—Upper-level management can buy into records management but not fully understand the complexity of an enterprise-wide ERM solution and fail to support and promote it when necessary.

Don't give up: regulatory compliance is not going away, and the pace at which organizations are generating documents and content requiring corporate control isn't slowing down either. You can break through the existing barriers that are undermining your success and you can do it now. The key to success is in starting small and systematically extending your deployment across your organization.

Six Steps to Success

You can avoid the difficulties of pleasing too many stakeholders and getting approvals for big ERM budgets by kicking off your solution as a pilot program. Start by understanding the capabilities and scope of today's ERM technologies, and specifically how ERM and enterprise content management (ECM) systems interact. Learn how the various components can work together to address document-centric business processes in your enterprise and feed content into your organization's RM system. Leverage the need for better content management in these areas to pilot your ERM solution without a large budget or waiting for buy-in from the entire company. Apply these six smart steps to piloting a successful ERM solution and you'll be enterprise-wide in no time.

STEP 1: Select an organizational partner that has funding available and is struggling with document-intensive processes. Finance and accounting groups are a good choice, as they are under particular pressure to ensure their internal procedures are compliant with various regulations. By showing them how they can automate one of their processes from start to finish with a content management solution that also enables electronic declaration of records, you should find it much easier to get the additional funding required to invest in your ERM solution.

Legal is another department that is often looking to control the cost and liability associated with documents. A content management solution that enables them to scan paper files and handle them electronically is an ideal project on which to "piggyback" your ERM initiative. Identify a key legal proceeding underway or an area of significant concern and offer to support the process. This will be much easier with a document management system that includes scanning hardware, indexing capabilities, document routing, review, electronic storage, retrieval and distribution—the underpinnings of an ERM program.

STEP 2: Perform an audit of your existing hard-copy records. Research indicates most organizations are storing content far longer than they need to, at significant cost and legal risk. If you can identify these kinds of inefficiencies, you may be able to justify your ERM initiative by demonstrating how electronic document management can lower the requirements (and the cost) for outsourced storage—and enable greater compliance with destruction policies.

STEP 3: Find out if your IT group is already looking at an ECM solution and help them understand how your pilot can be integrated into their plans. Offer to work with IT to identify costs for deployment and configuration and offer to share the expense of the pilot. Point out that good ECM solutions offer powerful records management modules, but great systems emphasize usability, especially for non-records managers. One cautionary note: never sell the need for ERM by making claims to management about your projected compliance level once the software is in place. Records management is a corporate process, driven by regulatory requirements—a process that impacts almost every employee in the company. The scope is too broad and the variables too great for any one department to accurately measure compliance, let alone calculate projected gains. Focus your ROI message on the tangibles instead: steps removed from a process, minutes removed from retrieving a document, or dollars saved by reducing the need for hard-copy storage space.

STEP 4: Select an ERM solution that's easy to use. Almost every knowledge worker deals with corporate records on a daily basis. Even with automation, employee adoption will only be achieved if your ERM application is straightforward, easy to use, and ideally helps employees work faster overall. If your pilot requires workers to adopt new processes it's not likely to generate a high adoption rate.

Don't ask users to jump to a different application or interface to classify or declare records or make any significant changes to the way they are used to working. With this in mind, select a Web-based ERM application that doesn't require new software on the user's desktop. Keep training requirements to a minimum. If these criteria are present, users can more rapidly see how ERM can speed and simplify processes, and interest in adopting it will increase.

Also ensure your pilot solution can easily scale up to handle ERM needs corporate-wide and that employees can be "RM-enabled" quickly. Ideally users need only open a browser and log-in to benefit from a full range of capabilities: document management, collaboration, workflow, imaging AND electronic records management.

STEP 5: Keep a low profile during initial deployment. Focus the success of your pilot at a tactical level, rather than spending time on broad plans for an enterprise-wide rollout. Pilot expansion will depend on your demonstrating a flexible, streamlined solution that can be easily adopted for enterprise-wide use. Don't jump the gun and start showing the solution to other stakeholders until you have moved well past your beta-phase and can demonstrate real process improvements and increased productivity.

STEP 6: When the time is right, invite others to take a look. Encourage, rather than mandate, adoption and offer access on a "trial" basis to the key stakeholders you identified in Step 1. Showcase the pilot by holding internal demos, and develop internal success stories to drive interest beyond the initial installation. In a modest amount of time, your pilot ERM project will help drive funding and deployment broadly in your organization—and your compliance system will have some real weight behind it.

Get Going

Above all, ensure success by selecting a vendor that provides the ease of acquisition, deployment, use and scalability you're looking for from day one. Xerox DocuShare with DocuShare Records Manager lets you deploy an ERM pilot that provides a full range of essential content and document management capabilities at an affordable price and with minimal IT or professional services overhead. You can also add scanning applications and Xerox multifunction devices to capture and manage hard copy documents as part of your records management program.

Six Steps to a Successful ERM Pilot

1. Zero-in on document-intensive processes in key departments;

2. Find cost-savings in replacing hard-copy storage with an ERM system;

3. Gain IT's support by including ERM with ECM deployments;

4. Select a solution that is easy to acquire, easy to deploy and easy to use;

5. Ensure pilot success before rolling out to a larger audience; and

6. Demo the pilot to other departments and invite participation.

Piloting ERM Solutions with Xerox DocuShare

Renowned in the industry for its benchmark ease of acquisition, administration and use, DocuShare is a powerful Web-based enterprise content management (ECM) application that enables organizations of every size to rapidly deploy scalable ERM solutions. In fact, more than 4,000 organizations worldwide have purchased over a million DocuShare licenses to address their ECM challenges. DocuShare delivers value-rich functionality for document management, records management, collaboration, Web distribution, workflow, search and imaging, allowing customers to securely capture, manage, share and deliver critical information easily. DocuShare Records Manager allows users to easily declare all types of electronic content as records, while still maintaining access for use in other business processes. Records are visible to permitted users within pre-determined contexts and security is simple to set up and maintain. Worker adoption is encouraged by offering a familiar user interface that maps to everyday applications like Microsoft Outlook, offering "drag and drop" functionality and intuitive file management. DocuShare is built on open industry standards such as XML, WebDAV, JDBC and HTTPS, and supports multiple platforms, making it ideal to deploy to a large number of users regardless of their computing environment. DocuShare is highly flexible and doesn't require dedicated IT resources to manage and administer, so pilot deployments can be managed and controlled by key stakeholders for maximum success. Xerox provides a full range of easily integrated imaging and scanning hardware to bring hard copy documents into the repository, and advanced routing and handling options to support a wide range of business processes. Xerox and DocuShare offer a scalable, comprehensive solution that enables you to capture, manage, control, share and deliver critical content and documents at all points in your organization.

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Colman Murphy has more than 15 years of product management and marketing experience in imaging, document and content management. Currently Colman is responsible for the DocuShare product line, the ECM and compliance software offering from Xerox. Prior to joining Xerox, Colman worked at a number of Silicon Valley-based companies including Visioneer (developer of PaperPort) and Caere Corporation (developer of OmniPage OCR software).

DocuShare® is an intuitive, Web-based enterprise content management application designed for organizations, regardless of size, to collaboratively capture, manage, store and deliver information contained in documents, from creation through final disposition. An industry leader in ease-of-use, deployment and administration, DocuShare provides the essential functionality required to accelerate document-intensive business processes, meet regulatory compliance requirements and optimize information flow and productivity. Coupled with Xerox scan-enabled devices, DocuShare delivers an end-to-end document lifecycle solution from one trusted brand.