User Guides

To meet the increasingly complex legal, regulatory, and operational requirements for managing electronic records, organizations need to improve how they manage their business records.

- Records are retained on the basis of their value to the organization.
- Records management is an ongoing process, not a project.
- Records management is the discipline of defining and applying business rules related to the creation, protection, retrieval, and disposition of an organization’s records over time.
- Effective electronic records management requires the collaboration and integration of business, legal/compliance, records management, and technology functions within an organization.

Whether your goal is to meet increasingly complex regulatory requirements or to gain faster access to your information, planning is the key to any successful ECM implementation. Following these 12 steps will help you achieve your goals.

The first step in managing your content is getting it into your IT infrastructure. While many internal company documents are born, and remain, digital throughout their lifecycle organizations still need to ingest a tremendous amount of paper-based communications from outside.

In today’s world nearly everything produces a record—whether it is a document, email, or transaction. This means that records serve as “institutional memories” for decisions that people make in an organization. Courts, attorneys, and special interest groups have discovered that records are even more important than witnesses in determining “what did they know and when did they know it.” Records can help prove innocence or lack of intent.

Email management is not optional. You have too much email and it’s almost certainly out of control. Radicati Group estimates 578 million current email users (each averaging 85 emails daily), with 762 million users by 2008. Gartner indicates a 40% growth in email every year. As email has become central to how business gets done—communicating with customers, brainstorming products, documenting decisions, serving as de facto knowledge stores for your workers—the management of email has not kept pace with its importance. The continued lax attitude surrounding the use of email, and a lingering perception that it’s “just” email, exposes all organizations to unnecessary risk. Any email—whether residing on the messaging server, in the “deleted” folder, “archived” and saved locally, or on a shared drive—is discoverable.

Companies must be compliant. This necessity permeates organizations. Because existing regulations are revised and new ones created continuously, compliance is a moving target—a company is never finished with a compliance initiative. To most effectively cope with the ever-evolving need to comply with multiple regulations simultaneously, companies should develop a culture of compliance. This culture is focused on the implementation of policies, procedures, practices, and audits as part of everyday business operations. A framework is needed.

It's not enough to "manage" content. Of course, the ability to access the correct version of a document or record is important, but companies must go further. Content must be managed so that it is used to achieve business goals. Central to this strategy are the tools and technologies of ECM, which manage the complete lifecycle of content, birth to death. To drive understanding of these tools, this poster highlights a typical process for a piece of content as well as four primary area in which content, and ECM, in fundamental to the success of your company: Compliance, Collaboration, Continuity, and Cost.

Today, almost all business records are created and most live their entire lives electronically. Failure to manage electronic records and physical records in accordance with established records management principles is to turn a blind eye to potential risk. Here is an overview of records management issues that can leave you stranded on the road if ignored.

Enterprise Content Management is defined in various, though similar, ways by different vendors and consultants. One thing is clear-it is not just Web Content Management. ECM is a process that takes your content throughout its lifecycle-from the creation of an idea scribbled in a sheet of paper, to the management of the multiple working documents to flesh out that idea, to the archival and ultimate disposition of the policy that had its genesis in that flash of inspiration.

ECM technologies, properly implemented, improve access to your content, enable the reuse of content, and can provide faster time to market. Just remember that technology is only part of the solution. You must select the right technology for your particular business issues. The best technology installed in the wrong way (or for the wrong problem) is often useless.