Effective Records Management – Part 4 – Ensuring Adoption and Compliance of RM Policy

The following five tips can help ensure that a records management program achieves its goals:

1. Records Management is Everyone’s Role: the volume and diversity of business records, from emails to reports to tweets, means that the person who creates or receives a records is in the best to classify it. Everyone in the organization needs to adopt the records management programme.

2. Don’t Micro-Classify: having hundreds, or possibly thousands of records classification categories may seem like a logical way to organize the multitude of different records in a company. However, the average information worker, whose available resources are already under pressure, does not want to spend any more time than necessary classifying records. Have a few, broad classifications makes the decision process simpler and faster.

3. Talk the talk from the top on down: A culture of compliance starts at the top. Businesses should establish a senior-level steering committee comprised of executives from legal, compliance, and information technology (IT). A committee like this signals the company’s commitment to compliant records management and ensures enterprise adoption.

4. Walk the walk, consistently: For compliance to become second nature, it needs to be clearly communicated to everyone in the organization, and policies and procedures must be accessible. Training should be rigorous and easily available, and organizations may consider rewarding compliance through financial incentives, promotions and corporate-wide recognition.

5. Measure the measurable: The ability to measure adherence to policy and adoption of procedures should be included in core business operations and audits. Conduct a compliance assessment, including a gap analysis, at least once a year, and prepare an action plan to close any identified holes.

The growth of data challenges a company’s ability to use and store its records in a compliant and cost-effective manner. Contrary to current practices, the solution is not to hire more vendors or to adopt multiple technologies. The key to compliance is consistency, with a unified enterprise-wide approach for managing all records, regardless of their format or location.

Records Management: If the U.S. Government Can Get Its (White) House in Order, So Can Your Organization

“Proper records management is the backbone of open Government”, according to a press release dated November 28, 2011 from The White House Office of the Press Secretary.  We couldn’t agree more.

Decades of technological advances (along with a few spoliation issues, problems responding to information requests, and a pending sanctions motion or two) have led the United States Government to plan significant records management reforms.

Noting that the proliferation of technology and electronically stored information has “radically increased the volume and diversity of information that agencies must manage”, the U.S. government plans to develop a “21st-century framework” for records management, citing the following benefits:

- performance improvement

- the promotion of openness and accountability by better documenting agency actions and decisions

- lower costs

- better management of records (fewer lost records) and easier to use and share

- reduction in redundant efforts

All of these benefits apply in the private corporate context as well. In any event, if the U.S. government can prioritize and execute defensible records management, your organization can too.

Say Goodbye to Email

According to a story by Lesley Ciarula Taylor published today in the Toronto Star’s Business section, Atos Origin, a global information technology company, is giving its employees three years to abolish the use of all internal emails.

A shocking prospect?  Consider this:

Hearing reports that employees were spending hours each evening to manage their email, and that middle managers spend 25% of their time just searching for information, and estimating that only 10% of all emails are corporately useful, the company has taken the position that email “pollutes the work environment and encroaches into personal lives.” 

The CEO, Thierry Breton, notes that email has been largely substituted by social media solutions – leaving only 11% of young people (age 11-19) using email. In his view, this renders email “outdated”. Breton estimates that within two years, updates to and editing of existing digital information will create more than half of all new digital content.

To replace the email, Atos Origin is piloting a variety of social network solutions, most of which allow sharing and updating of information by employees.

What’s next? We’ll keep you posted.

Effective Records Management – Part 3 – Developing and Implementing an Enterprise Records Management Program

Controlling information starts by distinguishing records from non-records. In records management parlance, this is the distinction between records that companies send to the file room versus ones they throw away. Several studies estimate that most organizations can destroy as much as two of every three documents that they currently store. Studies also indicate that, apart from retaining too many records, organizations retain those records in multiple copies, further increasing the volume of stored information.

This tendency to save everything hampers an organization’s ability to properly manage those records that should be kept. Timely disposition of expired records ensures that information that should have been destroyed will not be swept up in a wide reaching legal discovery exercise during litigation or compliance exercises. Thus, de-duplication and timely disposition reduces potential liability risk while lowering operational costs, thereby benefiting the organization twofold.

Once business records are separated from disposable non-records and only one copy is maintained, they need to be classified for filing and applying retention periods. Retention schedules are determined by legal, compliance and operating requirements of the organization, must be consistent, apply the same classification system to both paper and electronic records.

Companies should implement a centralized records system to provide a single point of control and consistency for all of their records, be they on-site or off-site, paper or electronic.

With a single software solution, companies can:

• Manage records throughout their entire lifecycle
• Reduce their overall storage costs
• Mitigate legal, regulatory and compliance risks and provide clear audit trails
• Streamline record retrieval for both on-site and off-site records
• Generate standard and ad-hoc reports
• Extend enterprise content management or document management investments

Ultimately, to be successful, records management must be integrated into the daily operations of the business.

Effective Records Management – Part 2

Part one of this series considered the current state of affairs that businesses in Canada find themselves with respect to managing records. This part outlines the steps involved in implementing a practical records management program.

The basic steps involved in developing a practical strategy that will be used by an organization’s employees are:

1. Assess the way records are currently managed.

2. Report findings and recommendations.

3. Draft policies and classification/retention plans that suit the organization’s records management culture.

4. Carry out a strategic planning session to determine how to implement the recommendations/create the implementation plan.

5. Implement the plan.

6. Train staff.

7. Audit and evaluate the records management program on a regular basis.

Assess the Way Records are Currently Managed

Every organization is different. Within each organization, business units, groups, and individuals all have their own ways of dealing with the vast amounts of information that pass their desk on a daily basis.

To interest people in managing records differently than they do now, the solution must satisfy the principle of local value. In other words, what they get out of the solution must exceed what they put into it. People have limited time, limited energy and limited enthusiasm. If they have to spend more time managing records, they must stop doing something else. The value it delivers must exceed what people have to put into it. Otherwise they will not bother.

Implementing an enterprise wide records management strategy is a change process. To be successful, we need to change attitudes and workflows and tools. People need to change how they see records from a personal attribute to a collective, from a source of personal power to a source of company power, and from something acquired in the classroom to something acquired every day through work. If people can understand this with their heads and grasp it in their hearts, then the change will be successful.

As this is a very personal equation, it is imperative that a clear understanding of how people are managing records is known. The only way to accomplish this is to speak to the people in the trenches. In our experience, this is most effective when the interviewer is from outside the organization – employees are less inhibited and more candid when there is no perceived threat of being singled out for “not following the rules”.

Part 3 of this series will delve into developing an effective records management strategy.

Effective Records Management – Part 1

Digital information in today’s businesses is threatening to overflow the banks of the information rivers. The 2010 edition of IDC’s Digital Universe report shows that information overload is not some future catastrophe waiting around the corner – it is here now, staring us in the face.

This explosive growth translates not only into higher cost related to storage, and with higher workplace inefficiency when searching for information. To compound the problem, records managers and CIOs must cope with a diverse and decentralized collection of both legacy paper and digital information. For example, a company’s payroll records may exist concurrently as reports in paper form stored at some off site facility, as Excel spreadsheets stored on centralized servers, individual employees’ computers, and as attachments to emails, and within a third-party, cloud based payroll system.

Most organizations are basically treading water right now – while the information tidal wave is upon them, their efforts are focused on plugging holes, not stemming the tide. To move forward in a proactive way, organizations need to develop an enterprise records management program.

Within most organizations, individual groups tend to develop their own way of managing records. In some cases, this is even left to individual employees, usually with difficult consequences when an employee leaves and someone else takes over that position. Although information is information, it is common to see the management of digital records treated differently than paper records. Organizations with long-standing records management strategies are struggling, as they try to force terabytes of digital records to fit within an archaic and usually complicated system original designed to manage a few 100 boxes of paper.

Lack of consistency and simplicity, combined with the abundance and ever growing volume of digital records, makes it difficult for even the most proactive companies to achieve compliance. The answer to this dilemma is simple – organizations must adopt a single set of records management policies coupled to a simple plan that governs all information, regardless of the data format or location. By implementing standard, enterprise-wide practices for classifying, retaining and destroying records, a company lowers its risk of non-compliance and increases its efficiency, reducing costs. These policies form the backbone of any compliant records management program.

In practice, implementing these strategies can be fraught with potholes. In part 2 of this series, we’ll discuss the steps involved in developing a practical ERM program.

Information Overload

Recent studies and articles make the case for better information management:

• Information workers, who comprise about 63% of the U.S. work force, are bombarded each day with 1.6 gigabytes of information through emails, reports, blogs, text messages, calls and more.

• U.S. companies lose an estimated $900 billion a year in lost productivity because of information overload.

• The average knowledge worker — from computer programmers and rocket scientists to administrative assistants and accounting clerks — spends about 25% of the day searching for information, getting back to work after an interruption and dealing with other effects of information overload.

Information overload is escalating. While IT departments look for solutions, relatively few companies have policies and procedures in place deal with the issue or help their employees do so.

Here are some tips:

Take Control

Gaining control over the information can help ease the sense of overload.

Relying on interaction through the inbox takes away an individual’s control of the information that comes to them – they are at the mercy of information that other people deem important.

An alternative way to interact that gives an individual control over information that is most important to them is through the use of internal social-networking tools, such as shared web pages (known as wikis) and collaborative sites, such as those facilitated through SharePoint.

Another way to focus on what’s important is to set up alerts and feeds from disparate sources, based on keywords. Of course, this means more email, so it’s also important to set up rules to direct less important messages into specific folders that can be checked only when needed.

Control can also be achieved by assuming a proactive, rather than reactive, work ethic. Organize the day into blocks of time that are quiet, focused work, where email is not checked, and specific times when you check email. During the quiet times, post a do not disturb message for instant messages.

Prioritize and Organize

Plan how to manage the messages as they arrive. Messages that can be dealt with in less than two minutes should just be taken care of and then deleted immediately. If the message requires more time, delegate it or defer it. If the message is deferred, move it to an action folder or a to-do-list (Microsoft Outlook has the ability to easily flag emails for follow up in the future).

Send Less

It’s a well understood principle – the more email you send, the more you get. Here are some specific ways you can better manage the information flow:

• Reduce word count. Sending concise email messages with clear subject lines.
• Put necessary tasks at the beginning of the message, to avoid the recipient being unsure what to do.
• Don’t hit “reply all” unless absolutely necessary.
• Send “thank you” emails, and never “reply all” for those.
• To decrease interruptions, turn off “new email” alerts and cancel the “new mail” alert on your desktop.
• Sort your inbox by sender, or create a rule to mark messages from key contacts in different colors.

While individuals can take control on their own, organizations that have well written, established and enforced policies and procedures will find that information management has been streamlined. These organizations will be rewarded with increased productivity.

Predictive Coding Demystified

Predictive coding has received a lot of attention lately as the next great magical wand in the e-discovery bag of tricks. However, as with any new technology, there are a number of different implementations and marketing claims that are confusing the whole picture of how this system can help make the e-discovery process more efficient and ultimately reduce costs.

In a nutshell, predictive coding involves the application of sophisticated artificial intelligence to permit the computer to make suggested determinations based on human interaction and the content of documents.

All predictive coding incarnations basically involve the review lawyer coding a subset of the records in the collection. The system examines the decisions made by the reviewer and identifies properties of the documents that it can use to automatically make determinations. As the reviewer continues to code documents, the system predicts what the reviewer will code. When the system’s predictions and the reviewer’s actually coding coincide (within reason), the system has learned enough to make confident predictions on its own.

Predictive coding is being applied at several stages in the e-discovery analysis and review processes:

Culling: In this mode, a lawyer who is an authority on the matter makes relevance decisions on a subset of the records. Once a sufficient number of records have been reviewed (typically a few thousand), the system applies its predictive analysis to the entire set to cull out the records most likely to be relevant. These records can then be subjected to the normal, manual review process.

Subjective Coding: The predictive coding system examines the subjective coding decisions made by lawyers as they manually review records. When a sufficient number of records have been reviewed, the system will start to make coding suggestions for subsequent records to assist the lawyers.

Review Quality Control: Along the same lines as predictive subjective coding, the system uses the subjective coding decisions made by lawyers to predict how documents should be coded. However, instead of suggesting codes for un-reviewed records, the system will apply the predictions to all manually coded records and identify those records where its predictions and the actually coding diverge. This will enable reviewers to zero in on documents that may not be coded correctly.

Prioritization of Records for Review: Predictive coding can also be used to prioritize records in a review. Once a sufficient number of records have been manually reviewed and coded, the system can group un-reviewed documents based on its coding predictions. The review project manager can then group all documents likely to be coded relevant, for instance, and assign these to be reviewed first.

Predictive coding technology is also being considered in several electronic  records management solutions to permit automatic classification of records, removing the burden from individual users.

This technology is being incorporated into more and more e-Discovery software systems, and may soon become a standard way to cull and review electronic data.

For more information on this technology and other cutting-edge e-discovery solutions, contact us.

It’s 9:00 am. Do You Know What Your Employees Are Doing?

One of the challenging and often expensive aspects of collecting data for litigation, regulatory investigation or audit is locating all sources of potentially relevant evidence. That exercise is difficult enough when considering only company equipment and devices (computers, Blackberries, servers, shared drives, etc.).  The scope grows exponentially when one considers the personal devices possessed by employees, including home computers, cell phones, Blackberries, iPhones, iPads, etc. Your employees are using these personal devices for business purposes, which means that potentially relevant evidence is stored on devices your organization does not ultimately control.

Think this doesn’t apply in your business?  Think again.

According to a study of 4,500 users in 13 countries by KRC Research (published in The Globe and Mail on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 on page B7), 40% of workers use their personal devices for business purposes. Further 50% of workers who use their own devices for business reasons access company networks without their employer’s knowledge.

Perhaps it is time to revisit your organization’s Records Retention, Acceptable Use, Security and/orTechnology policies?

Call us.

Wortzman Nickle’s Training Sessions – Now Accredited by LSUC

Over the past several years, the Susans have worked with a significant number of Canada’s top law firms. Several of these firms have invited us in-house, to speak to groups of litigators and business lawyers about the perils and opportunities inherent in e-discovery, and the benefits of proper records management. Each session is 90 minutes in length. These presentations have evolved over time to keep pace with the changes in technology and approach to discovery.

We are pleased to announce that these Wortzman Nickle education programs have now been accredited by the Law Society of Upper Canada as follows:

• Our e-Discovery program has been accredited for 1 hour toward the New Member Requirement and 0.5 hours toward the Professionalism Requirement for ongoing members.
• Our 90 minute Records Management program has been accredited for 1.5 hours toward the New Member Requirement and 1 hour toward the Professionalism Requirement for ongoing members.

These time-effective and interactive sessions are ideal for a lunch meeting or firm retreat. Call us to discuss bringing these sessions to your team.