Spring Cleaning – Your Records Management Checklist

By Gretchen Nadasky

 

When you make something, cleaning it out of structural debris is one of the most vital things you do.  – Christopher Alexander, architect and design theorist

This is the time of year when lifestyle gurus publish their tips and techniques for cleaning the house, putting away last year’s tax return documents and organizing the gear in the garage for summer fun.  At Optimity Advisors, we are busy helping clients spruce up the corporate house with Information Management.  Here are some questions to see if it’s time for your company to do some spring cleaning.

It’s 2014, do you know where your risk is? – The first few years of this century may someday be thought of as the Era of E-Discovery.  Huge lawsuits from competitors and whistle-blowers have been won and lost with the smoking gun of a careless e-mail or leaked e-document.  But did you know that the bigger risk might be lurking in off-site storage?  Since physical documents are more costly to access, a new strategy of plaintiffs is to demand large swaths of physical documents in digital form.  Companies that don’t know the location and contents of boxes in off-site storage waste millions of dollars on law associates to cull boxes and scan (mostly irrelevant) documents. The process is risky, expensive and adds no enterprise value. Has your company developed and maintained a retention and destruction schedule to minimize this risk?  Are the officers of your company aware of the nature of the archived documents so they can make educated risk assessments about that information?

Is there a place for everything… and everything in its place? – Pop quiz: In your company, where are the corporate records located?  Today, the answer for most companies is “everywhere.” Workers, managers and corporate officers are now expected to create documents wherever they are.  In response to that pressure and others they also store them wherever it is convenient.  In addition, third party vendors may be holding important corporate information that only they can access.  Cloud solutions can help rein in the digital diaspora but only if the documents can be located in the first place.  Lastly, if there is no place to store records employees are more likely to keep multiple copies for convenience, increasing overall storage costs.  Does your company know where its records are being held?  Is there a policy in place to help employees avoid common pitfalls like storing vital records on their hard drive?  Do agreements with third party vendors include provisions for the return of your own information?

Plan to go abroad this year? -  With the international news cycle full of stories about security breeches of individuals and companies in the United States, European and Asian companies are becoming hesitant to expose their own citizen’s information in the US.  Safe Harbor talks are heating up the backchannels of diplomacy and are likely to result in stiffer international rules. Is your company thinking about expanding or hiring abroad?  What systems and procedures are in place to protect electronic Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from hacking or misuse?  A good spring cleaning program would include an assessment of PII in everyday workflows to ease the flow of international trade.

What would the CEO do? – Launching a corporate-wide spring cleaning initiative will take a directive or guidance from the top.  Most employees want to be good information stewards. Clear direction from the top will give employees permission to take time from their day-to-day role to manage their own information.  With the amount of content being generated everyday, it takes a little effort from the entire company to make sure that information is properly handled, but the key to success is clear and concise directives. Does your company have an executive mandate for information governance?

Do you fight for your rights – or even know what they are? – At most companies content creation in king.  Business moves at lightening speed and often the priority is to get the next campaign on-line or content out for the e-commerce site.  In the haste to make something new the rights and permissions for images or talent can get separated.  A good digital asset management system can keep the records together with the assets and allow for re-use that saves time and money later.  Is there a place in your company to store rights information for the expensive content that is purchased? Do users know where to find internally created content so they don’t have to keep re-inventing the wheel?

Optimity Advisors can help to start with one initiative to get your company moving on the path toward controlling digital and physical information and protect important corporate records. Once people see the success of the project they will have ideas of their own to increase efficiency, lower costs and decrease risk.  Happy spring cleaning!

 

Gretchen Nadasky @GNadasky is a Senior Associate at Optimity Advisors.