- Know what you have
- Find what you need
- Dispose of what is unnecessary
- Reduce your risk and costs

So what is Unified Records Management that makes all of this possible? It’s a holistic system of record that allows you to consistently manage all records, regardless of format or location.

Know What you Have? Inventory Management
Its sounds fundamental, but most organizations struggle to know what information they actually have. Information is spread across formats, geography and systems with little consistency or continuity. Not everything is a record, and not all information needs to be managed. So organization must first decide what’s important enough to keep and track.

To get a handle on information inventory, it helps to break it into categories: onsite physical, offsite physical, active digital and archival digital. From here, you can start to compile and review the systems that manage the inventory in each category. The goal is fewer systems with tighter integration to provide better control and consistency.

Find What You Need? Search & Retrieval
Once you know what you have, this should help you access what you need. It’s not about having the most information. It’s about the ability to access the right information at the right time. The more information you have, the harder it is to find what you need.

Records management is about organizing and classifying information for retrieval. This is part of the challenge with digital information because technology has made it possible for us to ignore indexing and classification since the digital format allows for sophisticated searching. Auto-classification is really an extension of this expectation, but has actually served as more of an excuse to allow for poor electronic records practices, hoping that auto-classification will one day be able to clean up the mess.

Classification of records is a way of assigning context to information to make it meaningful in relationship to the rest of the records inventory. The better information is indexed, the easier it is to find. Systems and processes that make this intuitive and consistent lead to better access.

Dispose of What You No Longer Need? Retention & Holds
Get rid of what you don’t need so you can find what is important. If you open your desk drawer to organize it, the first intuitive step is to throw out the garbage and irrelevant junk. So it’s just as important to eliminate irrelevant information as it is to classify and organize what is relevant. Our ability to generate and distribute information faster only dilutes the real information among the flotsam and jetsam of irrelevant data.

Disposal must be conducted according to a retention schedule that provides a consistent process to identify records that are eligible for destruction. In addition, you may need to place some items on hold, suspending their disposal due to tax, audits or litigation. A centralized system of record that manages all of your inventory will allow you to systematically apply the proper retention and administer any holds that impact this process.

How Can You Reduce Your Cost and Risk? Compliance
Risk and cost are closely aligned when it comes to records management. Your cost and risk increase with the amount of information you manage, and they decrease with the degree of control and consistency you have over that information. In other words, good records management reduces your costs and minimizes your risk.

Proactive records management allows you to destroy information that is no longer needed, providing better access to what is relevant and a more efficient and consistent process to do so. It also yields faster access, lower management and storage costs, better results and cost savings.

Reactive records management highlights the risk and exposure of information. What if you can’t find the right information in time? You have kept things that are irrelevant that must now be produced, or worse, can be taken out of context and should not have been retained. Good records management is also about risk mitigation and avoiding these scenarios.

Unified Records Management is an intuitive way to address these issues and ensure your organization has an Information Advantage.

To do it, it is helpful to break down the primary goals of records management to its core elements. This provides a framework that helps organize the moving parts of a solution.

Here are the 3 principles:

1. Inventory – know what you have
2. Policy – know how long to keep it
3. Process – provide efficient access to it

There is no magic to these principles, but having all three establishes a strong foundation capable of scaling with growing volumes of information, multiple physical and electronic record systems, and mounting regulations and governance issues.

Inventory:

Inventory management involves the collection and categorization of all records information. Essential to any record program is the establishment of a definitive point of control for the inventory of records information. Typically, this is achieved through a System of Record that centrally controls the inventory.

Policy:

Once the inventory is identified, it is possible to apply policy to records information. Organizations have risk and obligation associated with their records information that must be mitigated and managed through consistent policy management. These policies include a classification system, retention schedule, hold procedure, disposal and other processes to define, manage and control the records information.

Process:

Once you have the inventory and the ability to apply policy, you can establish consistent rules and processes for the most efficient and effective management of the records information. This is the workflow of the records-that is, how they move throughout an organization during creation, active use, storage, access, through to destruction.

This framework has proven rather durable. It is broad enough that all elements of records management are captured in one of these categories, while each is essential so that you cannot properly manage records without all three.

Consider the following metaphor. Remember the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Ark is boxed and shelved in the infinitely massive government warehouse? This epitomizes the challenge of poor records management practices. After all the work (and drama!) to discover the Ark and its massive powers, it’s destined to languish forgotten in a warehouse, along with innumerable other items. This isn’t much different than the value many companies never realize from their information that’s locked in various corners of their organizations.

Now imagine the director’s cut including a records management process that focuses on inventory, policy and process. (Granted, it’s a stretch.) The Ark would be indexed as part of the central control of all inventory maintained in the warehouse. The appropriate policy would be applied to classify its contents, determine its retention period and when it’s eligible for disposition, and apply potential holds. Perhaps there is an audit hold on any item that has supernatural capabilities, for example. Finally, process controls would ensure that the Ark can be accessed and is properly tracked. This would, of course, defeat the purpose of the scene, allowing records management principles to triumph and ensure that a quick search for the “Ark of the Covenant” yields the exact location of the item for efficient retrieval.

While companies aren’t storing Arks, their information is just as valuable. Each user’s desktop computer represents its own vast government warehouse, capable of locking away each record into an irretrievable void.

The cornerstone principles of inventory, policy and process certainly do not provide a complete answer, but they do provide a realistic starting point. Given the complexity of today’s records management challenges, a good starting point maybe the best way to begin the journey.