Records Management: Whose Job Is It Anyway?
As the old saying goes: garbage in, garbage out. So how do you make sure what goes into your records management system is accurate, secure and retrievable? Has it been placed into the right container where it can be found again when needed or the right retention schedule applied when it needs to be disposed of? The short answer: everyone is accountable. Whoa... "Hold on," you say. "Our knowledge workers have more to do than spend all day saving content with long strings of metadata attached." Of course they do, so it becomes management’s responsibility to make this process as simple and painless as possible so it can be done correctly.
If we are truly honest, we know that the most accurate way to classify a document is to capture it at creation by the person who knows why it was created. No automated system will ever be as accurate at this process as the human brain. While an organization may have a dozen or more types of documents, (contract/agreements, correspondence, order forms, invoices, etc.), the good news is most people work with relatively few of them. By limiting the options, the margin for error is reduced.
The diagram on Page 8 explains the relationship between the content users’ and management’s roles as it relates to the components of a records management system. There is an inverse relationship between content users and management. Management has a large influencing role as the knowledge structure is defined and the research is done to determine which compliance requirements are applicable to their organization. There is a shared role as the records management best practices are defined and configured to support the business users. In the final stage the users of the content, who are empowered through education, have the predominant role as the knowledge base contributors and readers. Business processes overlay the entire system to ensure quality results at all stages.
Planning
Management has the responsibility to think enterprisewide and determine the knowledge structure for their organization. Which information needs to be captured for business purposes, and which for compliance?
The compliance requirements will be based upon legislative and other standards defined outside the enterprise such as: Sarbanes-Oxley, VERS, 21 CFR part 11, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, US DoD 5015.2-STD, ISO 2788, ISO 15489.1-2002, ISO 15489.2-2002, TNA (UK) PRO II and AS 4390-1996. This list is intimidating to be sure, but knowing which ones apply to your organization now will help build a stronger foundation for your information management solution.
The business rules will be the policies, procedures and guidelines within the enterprise regarding how the organization interprets those compliance requirements into business practice. What will be the email management policy? What are the procedures regarding USB thumb drives? What will be allowed to be saved on a laptop hard drive? These rules must then be communicated and enforced across the enterprise in order to ensure compliances to the standards and legislation on which they were based.
The people who need to be engaged at this stage are C-level executives, legal department, information technology, records management, project management and change management experts. Lines of business and department representatives participate to bring their knowledge of their own vertical silos of information to this process. Among the participants, a knowledge champion needs to be identified to serve as the central coordinator and liaison between management team and the business/department owners.
Records Management Best Practices
Once it is determined why and what information has to be managed, the next step is to establish how.
The records managers decide on taxonomy, nomenclature and classification systems. They also work with legal and business units to create retention schedules to support the legal obligations and business requirements. Business unit representatives work with system administrators to create system security through access control lists to ensure only the right people can access the appropriate information.
The key to successful records management systems is creating the appropriate buckets/containers/folders to store the content in a way that will make sense to the end users. This is a case where less is definitely more. A paper records system that may track a thousand or more file cabinets can now be simplified to a hundred or fewer containers because retrieval of electronic content is now automated.
Part of the structure around the information can also include creating workflows within departmental solutions to control and manage business processes. By designing workflow into the system, it simplifies teaching the process to the users and can guide the action items to their correct location in the repository.