Strategy

ERM Community Wiki

To get anywhere effectively with electronic records management, you need to have a strategy. A vision. A roadmap. As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. A records management strategy needs to encompass paper and electronic records (it’s the content that determines what a record what is a record is, not the container). Records managers need to think beyond the proverbial box. IT needs to understand that saving emails to backup tapes does not a records strategy make. Effective implementation of your strategy requires you to think beyond records managers to include any employee who creates records (training them and addressing change management ); plus bringing your IT and legal departments together with executive sponsorship to create a team-based approach to records management.

The strategy should, off course, take Records Management Principles into account. Records management is not just about the records—it’s about knowing what you need to keep and what you don’t—so records management can be more valuable to an organization beyond just “we have to keep records.” With the right vision and effective implementation, records management can lead to many benefits for organizations, not the least of which is saving on storage and storage management costs (physical and virtual).

Most important, strategy DOES NOT EQUAL technology. If you begin with a manual mess, adding technology will only create an automated mess. Technology is not a panacea. It is a tool. You need the right strategy and planning to effectively use that tool. Technology can de-duplicate electronic information, apply records retention rules through the use of carefully planned and implemented business rules, make searching and accessing information as easy as using Google, but it all takes strategy.

A records management strategy is key to compliance. So, centralized or decentralized, get going today.

One final note on strategy. Again, don’t fall into the trap of thinking of ERM as a technology problem. The IT aspects are often the easy part. Establishing good records management practices, whether for physical or digital records, is more about changing organizational culture than anything else. Many organizations have implemented perfectly good technical solutions that have not been successful due to a lack of buy-in by the intended users of the system. A robust change management plan that covers why records are important to the organization, how the business classification system works and what the business policies are is essential. Only then should training in actual use of the technology solution occur.

Curious as to whether your records are in order? Take a look at the Records Management Audit Checklist link-ot-RM-audit-checklist and the Pre-Race Checklist. If you answer “no” more than once . . . .keep reading.