Marrying Records Management and Enterprise Content Management

Electronic Records Management is emerging as a key component of enterprise content lifecycle management. It is the ability to systematically capture, process, organize, retain and preserve, provide access with security and finally dispose of official corporate content based on rules defined by the organization, and mandated by laws and industry regulations. Records Management is an emerging infrastructure function, and ultimately, a component of ECM.

Rescuing Corporate Knowledge

Today, more than ever, managing content lifecycle has become a key requirement by all enterprises regardless of their industry focus. It is now widely accepted that organizations lacking a clear program for implementing content lifecycle management solutions may fail to systematically capture their corporate content, organize it in a corporate classification, preserve it and manage it. These organizations run the risks of accidental or sometimes deliberate destruction of official content, the unnecessary and expensive retention of obsolete content, and most importantly the loss of a key asset in the organization—“corporate knowledge”—resulting ultimately in non-compliance with legal and regulatory obligations. The capabilities required to deliver such seamless solutions include the receipt and processing of records for storage, archival, preservation and persistence; and the access, retrieval, redaction and dissemination of these archived records.

Next-generation electronic records management solutions need to extend their traditional records lifecycle management functionality to encompass technologies that can manage content lifecycle along the following guidelines:

• Capture content declared as official corporate records;;

• Interpret the content of these records and process them based on content policies defined by the organization;;

• Authentically store, preserve and secure these records;;

• Provide access to the content, free from dependency on where it is stored (physically or as part of a superset of other content); and;

• Provide an auditable process for the identification, archiving, retention and disposition of content based on corporate policies, and legal and industry regulations.;

The above must be provided seamlessly within the content management environment. It must be also applied to the content while it remains in its native environment and integrated with the existing business processes. In addition, this technology must be extended to an ever-increasing variety of document formats stored in a wide variety of sources.

Leading Edge Records Management

Most current records management products are self-contained and closed systems targeted at the RM professionals. These products require the physical migration of documents from their source repositories to their own proprietary repositories, which ultimately leads to the creation of isolated islands of information that are disjointed from the rest of other corporate content.

Leading Edge Records management must be able to integrate seamlessly into the content management environment so that documents and records are handled in a seamless manner (with the additional controls imposed on the records):

• It must manage records, apply security to them, perform retention and disposition actions on them while they remain in their native repositories;;

• It must provide simultaneous support for multiple types of record repositories;u It must maintain the integration of documents that become records with business processes; and;

• It must interpret the content of records based on corporate policies and subsequently apply actions to these records based on these policies.;

The benefits of such an approach are numerous and include:

• Direct bottom line benefits, such as: leverage of existing IT infrastructures, procedures, and personnel; reduced total cost of ownership; improved productivity and efficiency; reduced legal risks; and elimination of expensive and unreliable migration of records between stores.;

• Indirect, intangible benefits, such as: improved access to corporate knowledge; and higher user acceptance.;

• Better customer service through: effective and efficient servicing of external (public, corporate, etc.) information requests; and compliance with privacy and access to information regulations and laws. ;

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Mobius (formerly eManage) provides key technology components to be embedded in enterprise content management solutions, and has been a pioneer in developing innovative software solutions for electronic records management and email archiving and lifecycle management. These solutions address the market needs for intelligent content interpretation and processing, content lifecycle management and archiving. eManage products enable organizations to improve productivity, reduce the total cost of ownership of its’ messaging infrastructure, mitigate legal costs and risks, ensure compliance with corporate policies and enable regulatory compliance.

eManage enjoys a top tier leading position in North America as a provider of electronic records management and email management solutions. eManage products are U.S. DoD 5015.2 certified and compliant with several industry regulations such as SEC 17a-4, HIPAA, FDA rule 11 and Canadian PIPEDA/C6. Headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, eManage markets its innovative solutions worldwide through a network of distributors, OEM partners, value added resellers and system integrators; with customers in government, securities, healthcare, utilities and banking