SharePoint for Working Productively, ECM for Complying Confidently

Mention the term “information governance” to anyone responsible for originating content—devising engineering specifications, building financial investment strategies, drafting a legal brief—and chances are that eyes will quickly glaze over. Today’s knowledge workers engage in collaborative activities requiring a high degree of concentration and mental processing of complex, nuanced information in many different forms, both written and visual. Information comes at them from multiple inputs via multiple channels such as documents, e-mail, PDFs and even paper. The last thing on their minds is a corporate governance policy—and why shouldn’t it be?

The truth is that information governance simply cannot be ignored by organizations today. The demands for it come from compliance imperatives, privacy regulations, retention policies and litigation, and the list goes on. Given escalating pressure from nearly every quarter, from legal departments to compliance officers, CIOs failing to implement consistent, comprehensive and enforceable enterprisewide governance strategies do so at their peril. The costs of unmanaged content can be measured in countless ways: failed certifications; product approval delays; security breaches that damage customer satisfaction and brand equity; productivity losses; and inefficiency. Sharing information, for example, can seriously compromise client privacy in healthcare and financial services organizations. In life sciences, or any industry involving closely guarded intellectual property, revealing confidential or proprietary information could impact patent claims. In nearly any large enterprise, content is subject to retention policies and legal holds, and that’s not even factoring in the countless, time-consuming internal and external audits required to prove good governance practices.

Striking the Balance

The burning question is this: how can organizations strike the right balance between the need for people to get their jobs done unimpeded and the equally critical need for effective and efficient information governance? The dilemma is especially acute for organizations that require not only robust content management capabilities but also records management. While content management addresses the ability to organize, store and retrieve structured and unstructured content, formal records management involves long-term storage, archiving, retention and disposition as mandated by various government regulations and industry standards.

It’s no surprise that these organizations are among the first to figure out the solution. Many are harnessing the power of Microsoft SharePoint, used universally for collaboration via tight integration with Microsoft Office tools, and combining it with a robust and scalable enterprise content management (ECM) platform. This way, they are removing the onus of records management—and of information governance in general—from the content producers, and essentially running it in the background.

In particular, large, regulated organizations that have tried to assert records controls within their SharePoint environments have found that the controls required for a good governance program are quickly questioned and sometimes rejected by their user communities. Instead, they have a best-of-breed approach for content creation and collaboration (SharePoint), as well as a secure ECM platform for declaration, classification and management of records. This way they provide their employees the productivity tools they prefer, yet have peace of mind knowing that their information assets are securely managed, preserved and protected in a scalable ECM platform.

For example, companies in the energy industry can rely on SharePoint as the familiar collection point for documents provided by customers, vendors and partners. Pairing SharePoint with their internal document management systems allows these firms to implement the tight controls required by industry regulations.

Additionally, in the insurance industry, records management policies require governance across the enterprise and all its information repositories. Again, SharePoint is the natural point for document collection and collaboration, but adding too much structure to SharePoint can defeat its purpose and compromise user adoption. The answer: wrapping SharePoint with document management provided by a dedicated ECM platform.

Merging Content into a Repository

How is it done? In short, an ECM platform provides a comprehensive records repository for the entire organization. By selectively integrating key governance features into SharePoint, the documents and other artifacts produced during SharePoint team collaboration can be transparently merged into the repository in the background. The ECM platform attaches the merged documents to applications running highly orchestrated business processes that monitor and enforce service-level agreements, contractual obligations, safety requirements, and policies for security and compliance. Once moved into the repository, documents produced via informal team collaboration are automatically placed under the control of formal information governance policies.

One example illustrates how well this works for compliance with records management policies. A large insurance firm providing workers’ compensation coverage implemented the EMC Documentum platform in response to an audit that found a number of compliance and governance problems. New policies were needed, but getting users to cooperate was a challenge. The new system provided the repository with automated processes to manage retention schedules, records disposition, and the application and extension of legal holds. With this seamless integration, the organization ensured complete visibility and access to its enterprise file plan and retention policies for all departments and employees. The firm has successfully addressed the audit finding, and sees significant productivity improvements and storage cost reductions as a result.

Reducing Risk While Boosting Efficiency

This frictionless approach helps companies avoid building custom extensions for SharePoint to try to boost its information governance capabilities. Team collaboration is orchestrated into business processes, including partners, customers and suppliers, via SharePoint, with documents, meeting notes, communications, etc. automatically stored in a searchable repository. The IT department reduces operating costs and simplifies SharePoint upgrades, knowledge workers are more productive, and the organization complies with standards and regulations. It’s the ideal way to balance opposing objectives: reducing risk while improving efficiency.