• Pains around the regulations that mandate compliance with your paper and electronic information
• What happens when there is an instance of litigation and you have to produce information for discovery
• How some companies are reducing costs and increasing efficiencies and compliance as a result of having a robust program.

Of course, at first glance, he’s right—this has nothing to do with art.

Building a robust, defensible, information management program really is an art form. Although there are best practices and standards that apply to everyone, we know that many elements are unique to each customer and we approach them as such. For example:

• Retention and discovery requirements differ depending on what type of business you’re in, and would be approached different depending on the size of your company.
• Although much progress has been made in the last few years, customers are struggling with HOW to get their arms around their information (51%)*, even though they may know WHAT to do (86%).*
• Some customers are getting started with foundational elements to a program, such as building polices that emphasizes the importance of shredding confidential records, and others are trying to integrate their retention schedule with SharePoint 2010.

Each customer’s situation is different, and thus, helping each customer becomes something of an art form.

This year at ACC, we’ll be talking with attendees about how to improve their information management program, and will be discussing all the elements that make it unique to them. There will be a variety of tools available to help customers create their own information management masterpiece—compliance workbooks and with industry best practices, actionable ways to reduce litigation and discovery costs, and tools to assess your unified information management approach—with real time results. I hope to see you at ACC this year and that you’ll stop by booth #113 to create your own information management masterpiece.

Not going to ACC this year? You can still create your own masterpiece—and learn how to use your information to create a true business advantage.

*Based on an Iron Mountain survey of 3,500 customers

You can connect with me, Liz McCormick on Twitter at @mulizard. And yes, I will be in Denver at ACC.

Related Links:

• It All Adds Up: The Positive Effects of Smart Information Management
• Proactive Preparation: What Can a 7-year-Old Teach You About Information Management
• Compliance Advisor: Is Your Information at Risk?

Evidence shows that in today’s business environment, most companies take a reactive approach to information management —choosing to implement the proper measures only after a trigger event has revealed a weakness and created the need for improvement. There’s no doubt that trigger events—like litigation, audits or M&As—can provide a harsh wake-up call. So how does this impact you? Even if you haven’t experienced one of these events, being reactive in your information management strategy, may result in missed opportunities to realize cost savings, improve efficiencies and reduce the risks associated with noncompliance.

Liz McCormick explains the host of benefits that companies that implement a proactive information management program can realize in the areas of cost savings, compliance and efficiency. Has your organization experienced any of these benefits?

• Our documents are stored onsite. Or we leave it to our offices to determine where and how they store our records.
• We continue to field requests to approve incremental spend for additional storage hardware/servers.
• Employees are responsible for filing and retrieving the records used in our business processes.

Each of these scenarios represents needless spending in the area of information management.

One way that companies increase profitability is by keeping more money in their organization. A recent study by Gartner noted that realizing cost savings remains a “top 5” priority among senior executives. To achieve this, business leaders tend to focus on things like reducing headcount or restricting other non-essential expenses.

Information management is an area that is often overlooked for cost savings. Because information management costs are present throughout different departments and locations, you may be unaware of the total financial impact of these costs — and how to identify and act upon the opportunities to save. In partnering with over 140,000 customers, we have learned that many are initially unaware of the costs associated with the information that drives the business. But as numerous customers have shown us, the savings are quite significant. Consider these numbers:

• $10 Million: The average amount that a company of 500 employees spends to manage hardcopy information*
• $14,000: The annual value of lost productivity due to workers’ inability to locate information**
• $500,000: The recommended eDiscovery budget for a moderately sized case***

What Can You Do To Realize These Savings Yourself?

• Eliminate unnecessary information in order to drive down the expenses related to storing paper and electronic records
• Improve availability and accessibility to save the money typically associated with locating or recreating misplaced information
• Implement tiered management processes to reduce the average cost of storage

By leveraging these principles, your company will be better equipped to:

• Realize savings related to storing paper and electronic information, and supporting legal discovery
• Define retention policies that are consistently applied to information of all types
• Avoid unplanned expenses, as well as the fines and penalties associated with keeping too much or too little information

How have you realized cost savings in your company by focusing on information management?

*Based on Employer Costs for Employee Compensation,–December 2010 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Dept. of Labor. (2011, March 9).

** IDC. “Hidden Costs of Information Work.” IDC, 2006. (Doc #201334, April 2006).

***Gartner. “Reducing the Cost and Risk of EDiscovery in 2009.” January 9, 2009.

• “Why Spring Cleaning Does Not Always Work”
• “Turning Beetles into Pulp”
• “Video: What a 7-year-old’s toy room can teach you about proactive information management”
• “It All Adds Up: The Positive Effects of Smart Information Management”

But there’s some good news. An established information program with processes in place, supported by a legally credible records retention schedule is defensible in instances of discovery—and this effort of “good faith” counts for a lot, even if you’re not 100% in compliance with every single regulation.  But you shouldn’t approach compliance halfway—getting your information house in order makes these trigger events much less painful; you have less data to go through and you know where to find the documents that you actually need—whether they are hardcopy, electronic, active or inactive.

But how are companies really doing when it comes to compliance? And more importantly, how do they compare to you? Hundreds of you recently took part in an online survey on this topic, and I think you’ll agree that comparing your company’s concerns against those of your peers can shed light on how you approach these types of initiatives in the future. Some highlights from the survey results include:

• Reducing information management risk is key to achieving business success. No longer thought of as optional, you’re realizing that information management practices have a big impact where it matters most—the bottom line—and can ultimately result in a competitive advantage.
• Trigger events drive action!  More than a third of you wait until you are audited or in some kind of litigation to improve your information management approach. This is dangerous! The likelihood of your company being involved in some type of litigation or audit is up there with death and taxes….well, that might be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. The point is, if your information is managed in a formal program, you’ll encounter less cost and risks when these events occur—and they will.
• Applying electronic records to your retention schedule is painful! Nearly half of you are unable to apply your retention schedule to email, instant messages, word documents, spreadsheets and/or databases. If you’re in this group, you’re at a much higher risk for not being able to find what you need in the instance of discovery or an audit.

So there it is. You’re making progress, but there is still room for improvement when it comes to information management compliance. But the word compliance doesn’t have to be bad—by making small changes like making policies and procedures enterprise-wide, training, and having a legally credible retention schedule that includes both hardcopy AND electronic records, chances are good that you’ll be able to ride out an audit or an instance of litigation with minimal impact. In fact, you may even experience how your good information management practices actually boost your bottom line and improve overall efficiency in your business.

What are your experiences in making information management compliance a positive thing? How has it had a positive impact on your business?