Closing the Records Management Loop

This is defined in your policy and enforced across SharePoint deployments—closing the loop of what's defined in policy and what's being done in the business.

Beyond the SharePoint Sphere

Life would be wonderful if all information were stored and governed in one system such as SharePoint, but in reality this is not the case. Records live in repositories all over the company; running on different platforms from various vendors—IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, EMC, HP/Autonomy: the list goes on and on. There are also countless proprietary homegrown solutions as well as legacy applications running business-critical applications. While physical paper records are declining, these archives still play a role for the business and litigation. The goal of the governance program is to combine corporate policies with systematic enforcement across SharePoint farms, content repositories and physical archives stored across multiple warehouses.

With all of these measures in place, policies are now enforced, but the process doesn't end there. Organizations must be able to effortlessly measure the effectiveness of those policies. If 5,000 SharePoint documents were scheduled to be destroyed today across three SharePoint deployments, how do you know that happened? A dashboard that provides an audit trail of policy enforcement activity is vital to the closed-loop records management system. It has to have powerful, advanced drill-down capabilities that are simple to use, and that can be executed from anywhere, like a browser or existing corporate dashboards. Without this information, you can't defend disposition if the need arises.

In all likelihood, your company has key risk indicators (KRIs) to complement the key performance indicators (KPIs). Through a dashboard you must monitor and analyze the activity by jurisdiction, business unit, repository or even record type. For example, how many human resource records are on hold for South America or how many records are being over-retained across all SharePoint deployments?

The dashboard should be integrated with your existing business intelligence (BI) tools, and with it you could manage as well as monitor.

SharePoint governance is not a one-time activity; it needs to be monitored on a regular basis. Over time, business, operations and regulatory requirements will change, and when these changes happen policies need to be updated. The speed with which the business deploys and enforces these policies is critical to the success of your organization, which is why you need to close the loop. When you create a closed-loop records management system, you apply legally defensible governance controls over corporate information throughout its entire lifecycle and across multiple jurisdictions.