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.

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.

Records Management 2.0

How do organizations manage their important business and legal records. If they have an information management systems (less than half of the top 1000 companies in Canada do), it is not deployed across the entire enterprise, Most are being used as repositories to store even more copies of the records. The conventional wisdom in most organizations is just to keep everything, since it’s cheaper to store electronic content than it is to dispose of it. This is proving to be a falsehood.

When asked, the vast majority of business executives do not even consider records management to be worth consideration. The reasons for this are complex, but a recent study by AIIM revealed that:

• Information with content that would classify it as a business record is being created by knowledge workers 24-7;

• Content is created on a variety of corporate and personal laptops and smart phones

• Content is often stored on external servers and social media managed by third parties

• The volume of business records is increasing exponentially

• Business records are less taking the form of traditional documents, and are more taking the form of conversations in instant messages, tweets, chat rooms, discussion forums, etc.

• New communication channels and devices are introduced into the organization by knowledge workers leveraging consumer IT since enterprise IT is considered slow and tedious

Traditional principles from “paper-based” records management don’t work anymore. Volume alone is killing the manual processes, and the nature of the records is preventing organizations from specify how they should be stored or managed.

This lack of vision, combined with a non-workable existing records management strategy, has led to a chaotic collection of digital records. Systems such as Sharepoint offer promise, but are not being utilized effectively (most shared drives and SharePoint sites look like a digital landfill with little or no control).

Email is probably the largest contributor to the current mess, but is by no means the only variable. Massive duplication of records is quickly becoming the largest source of headaches for enterprise IT personnel.

The key to solving this dilemma is to move beyond the paper paradigm for records management. But how can this be accomplished? One way is to give Records Management a direct connection to a C-level executives, so that decisions involving risk are mitigated. Records Management also needs to shift to more of a “disposition management” focus – managing risk (and storage costs) by thinking about what goes rather than what stays.

The first step is getting help to figure out how bad the mess is, and what can be done to clean it up. Wortzman Nickle can show you the way.

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.

A Comprehensive Records Management Strategy is Key to an Effective e-Discovery Process

A recent paper published by Information-Management.com found that companies who assume that an e-mail archiving solution will solve their e-Discovery requirements may be sorely mistaken, for two important reasons – e-mail archiving systems generally do not incorporate the advanced analytical features necessary to quickly and efficiently sift through the emails and identify what’s needed, and e-mail archives do not store all of the enterprise content that may be required for e-Discovery.

To be sure, an e-mail archive is an important addition to an organization’s content management arsenal, but it should be considered as just one component of a comprehensive records management system.

While e-mail is likely the source for the majority of the information asked for in most legal discovery request, correspondence on social media and other Web 2.0 technology is equally important. Currently overlooked in a number of cases, the explosive growth of social media in the business arena will eventually make this an equally important evidentiary source.
The paper also pointed out that some organizations rely too heavily on technology when carrying out the discovery processes, forgetting that discovery in today’s modern, digital-based enterprise requires the right balance of people, processes and technology. All too often, technology is implemented without considering the resources that must also be devoted to the processes. This can lead to undocumented workflow procedures that do not pass the defensibility litmus test.

It is critical that organizations clearly define records management and e-mail usage policies for all employees – especially those who produce substantial email. Wortzman Nickle has led the way in drafting workable records management policies for Canadian organizations.

Enterprise Content Management – “Winging it” is no longer good enough

Organizations that think nothing of investing significant sums in systems and processes to manage their financial assets, physical assets and human assets rarely even consider implementing a strategy for managing information assets. Unfortunately, the volume of information that is being created and maintained by organizations nowadays is rapidly approaching a critical mass where just “winging it” will no longer suffice.

OK, maybe they’ll automate a specific process, like email archiving. But in terms of getting the corporate consciousness around the legendary “80% of the information in our organization that is unstructured,” they’ll get to that sometime, someday, somehow. The strategic necessity to manage information effectively is rapidly approaching, with devastating consequences for those who assume they can wait.

In the absence of a uniform information management strategy, most organizations arrive at what passes for a strategy simply by building on their current processes using the technologies and tools already in place. These tools are often the result of decisions made years ago, usually by individual departments. Although the prospect of simply ripping out this accumulated infrastructure is generally not an option, there are some hard questions that organizations should ask in terms of integrating and leveraging what they have and driving future decisions against a uniform, comprehensive strategy.

The good news is that there are a lot of content and records management options out there. The bad news is that there are a lot of content and records management options out there.

Wortzman Nickle, the leaders in e-Discovery and records management, can assist in determining which solutions would best fit an organization’s specific information culture, so that content is treated with the same respect as the organization’s money, inventory, and people.

Email Obesity

According to a recent Radacati Group study (Email Statistics Report, 2009-2013), business users in 2009 received an average of 20 megabytes (MB) of email per day – and that figure is predicted to reach 31 MB per day by 2013. What this means is, if you take that 2009 figure – 20 MB per day – and multiply it by 260 business days, you end up with a figure of 5.2 gigabytes (GB) of email per user per year. But it doesn’t stop there. If your organization has 1,000 employees, this figure is really 5.2 terabytes of email per year!

Radacati also found that users sent and received an average of 167 emails per day. Again, at 260 business days per year, this equates to over 43,000 messages per user per year – all of which you’ll have to search through in legal discovery, without proper email management.

Clearly, email is not trivial – or free. On the contrary, it is a vital business function involving vital business documents that should be addressed in a strategic, professional manner just as you would any other essential business practice. A recent AIIM study on email management (Email Management – The good, the bad and the ugly), shows that email is clearly not receiving the attention from the C-suite that it should.

Respondents confess to an appalling state of affairs, with over half of respondents reporting to be “not confident” or only “slightly confident” that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by staff are recorded, complete, and retrievable. To make matters worse, only 10% of organizations have completed an enterprise-wide email management initiative, and 17% have no plans to introduce any email management. This is really too bad, as getting a handle of your email is not rocket science.

Good email management begins with the identification of business-relevant emails and a policy for the classification, storage and destruction of these emails in accordance to, and consistent with, your business standards. From there, establish guiding principles, reduce email glut, decide what to hold, identify roles and responsibilities, automate when possible, and work with a cross-functional team at your organization to address policies and practices.

Wortzman Nickle can help you realize all the cost and time-saving benefits of defensible email management. Call us for details.