Records Management – An Invaluable And Holistic Information Tool

by Emily Lanois

 

How efficiently do you and your organization manage records? Does the term information management fill you with trepidation? A records management project that involves a large and diverse group of employees can yield unexpected benefits. It can sneakily change corporate culture and gather valuable insight into how to end inefficient and risky information management practices.

Records management is a discipline that provides great business value to companies that use it correctly. Its business case is most easily built on projected storage and legal discovery cost savings, along with the business value of preserving vital records for the correct length of time. A basic records management project includes creating and socializing a records management policy and records retention schedule. A retention schedule is nothing more than big-bucket records categories with associated retention periods.

In addition to the concrete benefits that justify the resources used for creating a records management policy and retention schedule, there are a variety of unintended benefits to be gained that should influence the project’s structure. Incorporating a multitude of employees in a records management project creates conditions for an organizational change in information management culture, enables the project team to recognize and take steps towards correcting broader information management issues, and provides a way to identify and mitigate information management risks. Although it may be most time-efficient to establish the fundamentals of a records management project with a small committee, the additional time spent working with a broader segment of the organization creates value that makes the extra time well worth it and provides a base for a greater information management overhaul.

Change in Information Management Culture

When an organization has never participated in a formal records management project, its employees probably believe that keeping all information forever is most efficient. For this cultural belief to change, the employees need to participate in the creation of the records management program. If they are to realize the ease and value of records management, they need to be part of the process.

As with many daunting tasks, employees may overestimate the effort required to identify and manage company records until they try. Initial skepticism turns to support when employees understand how records can be managed using big “buckets.” It takes workflow-specific, face-to-face conversation to convey the ease with which records can be distinguished from non-records and then placed in big bucket retention categories. Once records are identified and categorized, employees are empowered—and often excited—to dispose of records that are past their retention dates.

Employees commonly describe the experience of identifying and categorizing their records (for ultimate preservation or disposal) as “cathartic.” During a recent Records Management project led by Optimity, employees expressed relief that they had gained greater control of their department’s records after doing a records inventory. When employees are empowered to preserve and destroy the records that they create, receive and maintain, they add value to the company as information stewards. They also become champions of the records retention schedule and records management policy, increasing its legitimacy in the organization. Companies receive an unexpected benefit from a simple records management project when corporate culture shifts and information management becomes a valued discipline.

Recognizing and Correcting Information Management Issues

Meeting with employees to gather the information needed to create a records management policy and retention schedule inevitably leads to conversations about information management pain points. Most business groups suffer from daily encounters with issues along the lines of:

Inefficient collaboration processes
Lack of repositories for records storage
Incomplete metadata (or identifying information) about records located in offsite storage
Difficulty accessing information that is used regularly, resulting in the creation of convenience copies and proliferation of sensitive information

Although the above issues translate into inefficiencies and frustration, they are very difficult to remediate without allocation of extra resources to implement new processes, technology, and to clean up poorly organized repositories. Additionally, employees rarely feel that it is their responsibility to spearhead such an initiative lying outside of their job description. As a result, employees are often resigned to dealing with information management headaches as part of the job.

Gathering information about the creation, receipt and maintenance of records from a vast sample of employees provides the context for information management problems across business groups. Most employees are only privy to the information management issues that plague their day-to-day work. From the vantage point of a records management project that engages many employees, patterns are identifiable and business cases for enterprise-wide solutions emerge.

Additionally, senior level support behind the records management project can be used to escalate both departmental and enterprise information management issues to higher levels of authority, accelerating company-wide information management change, beyond the scope of records management (i.e. contract management, collaboration, knowledge transfer issues, etc.). The unexpected benefit of progress towards correcting major information management issues is achieved when problems are identified and high-level support is secured during a basic records management project.

Identification and Mitigation of Information Risks

Gathering records management information from a large cross section of an organization is like detective work.  Each question reveals a clue about the information landscape. When asking employees to describe the types of records that they work with, information risks—often unknown to the employee—emerge in conversation. Examples of such risks may include:

Unstructured data repositories not known to management (discovery risk)
Data stored in antiquated technology systems that require great expense to read (financial risk in the event of discovery)
Unsecured PII or PHI stored in company electronic or physical repositories (legal risk)
Vital records stored exclusively on an employees vulnerable hard drive (business, compliance and legal risk)

These types of risk are difficult to identify when doing so is the goal at the outset, while it is easy to gain this unexpected benefit through the natural interview process used to build a records management policy and retention schedule. Employees do not consider their practices to be risky, and do not have ownership of most of the information they work with, and as such are not very responsive to direct inquiries regarding potential information risks. They are even less likely to respond with helpful information when inquiries are directed broadly at their department, and when there is no benefit from offering information. However, when people are simply interviewed about their practices, especially with the benefits of records management laid out beforehand, the details of information workflow and storage emerge and illuminate areas of risk.

The unexpected benefit of awareness about information risks allows an organization to mitigate them, but more specifically directs the project’s records management policy to explicitly forbid and mandate certain practices to prevent the behavior that created risk.

The fundamentals of a records management project lay out the policy and guidelines for how employees should treat company records during their lifecycle, and tells them when and how to discard records when the lifecycle ends. However, a records management project becomes an invaluable and holistic information management tool when large numbers of employees representing a wide cross section of the organization are involved.

 

Emily Lanois is an Associate at Optimity Advisors