Over the past 12 months, the phrase 'records management'
has re-entered the business vocabulary, after several decades of
decline. Until recently, records management was seen as a dinosaur
of the pre-PC era - something that was necessary for handling paper
documents, but which was unnecessary in a world where everything is
online. Angela Ashenden and Alan Pelz-Sharpe comment on how all
that is about to change in a big way.A case of déjà vu?
In the rush to implement e-business many
principles were ignored, and we are now starting to pay the
price.
Records management has been with us for a
very long time; methods of managing the lifecycle of important
records go back millennia. However, in the rush to implement
e-business and the myth of the new economy, many fundamental
principles were ignored, and we are now starting to pay the
price.
Records management is an important
organisational function, whether the organisation is a local
government or a major enterprise. It not only ensures that our
organisations remain compliant with the many regulations that
govern records retention, but also enables the organisation to
access important information as and when it is needed, while also
addressing the major issues of storage management.
Why now?
The events of the past 18 months have served
to shock the business world back into reality. The tragic events of
11 September 2001 showed us that electronic records can be lost as
easily as paper records, and highlighted only too clearly the
impact that this can have on a previously stable and secure
business. Many finance and insurance companies lost everything in
the World Trade Center, and will never be able to retrieve that
knowledge again. While many of the lessons from this should focus
on storage and disaster management, the reminder that records need
to be managed properly is at least an underlying factor, if one
that is somewhat overplayed by some software vendors.
Similarly, the discoveries that were made
following the collapse of Enron and WorldCom have highlighted the
need for proper procedures to be followed when handling records.
They have also highlighted the complex ambiguities that surround
what is a record and what is not. Much of the legal argument in the
Andersen case focused on what should be kept, and what could be
kept. While the average business organisation has no idea what it
should or should not be keeping, it now knows that it is
responsible, and that the courts are unlikely to accept
excuses.
The situation is made all the more
difficult to manage when we consider the huge growth in electronic
records of all types. Twenty years ago, we only had to worry about
memos and letters. Today, we have the added medium of e-mail; and
for every letter within an organisation, there are probably over a
hundred related emails, many of which form an intricate chain in
the audit trail. The reaction from organisations such as the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in drawing up new rules
and regulations to prevent further scandals, is helping financial
directors to understand the consequences of these problems and the
need to re-establish corporate governance. The need to maintain
full audit trails of activities within the organisation, along with
formal archives of all business-related documents, whether
electronic or paper, is finally being recognised again.
A third factor in the rebirth of records
management is the continued need to manage records within the
government. Governments have always had huge volumes of important
documents that need to be stored and managed, and this has not
changed today. What has changed is that governments all over the
world have been mandated to "go digital" - e-government initiatives
are forcing authorities to move all records online. Being public
bodies, they are aware that they need to take the same records
management disciplines into this digital age that they have in
their existing paper one.
So what is records management?
Records management as a discipline covers
the whole range of records, from paper files, objects, letters and
deeds, through to electronic records such as Microsoft Word files,
engineering drawings and e-mails. Also known as recorded
information management (RIM), it denotes an entire business
discipline and methodology focused on managing the lifecycle of
business-related information from creation through to archive and
deletion.
The importance of records management is
highlighted by the multitude of government regulations and policies
outlining the processes for storing records. The most commonly
quoted regulation in the US is the recent Sarbanes-Oxley Act of
2002, which was brought into force following the debacle of
Andersen employees shredding important documents in the wake of the
Enron collapse. The US National Archives and Records Administration
(NARA) organisation and the UK's Public Records Office are two
examples of bodies whose entire business is focused on ensuring
records are maintained correctly and effectively.
However, while there are specific pieces of
legislation in both Europe and the US that focus on records
management issues, the reality is that there are in fact thousands
of pieces of legislation on the subject. Which ones are important
for your particular organisation is a matter for your lawyers to
advise on.
The role of technology
In the same way as the practice of records
management, records management software is not new. It has been in
existence in some form or another for almost 15 years, and despite
the introduction of the Internet, very little has changed in that
time in terms of its goals and purpose. Records management
software, from vendors such as Tower Software and OmniRIM, focuses
on providing a means to electronically store, version, track and
retrieve paper and electronic records, as well as enabling them to
be archived and deleted according to a specific set of rules.
However, the recent events have brought the
technology back into the limelight, and this is highlighted by the
recent acquisitions by two high-profile content management (CM)
vendors, Documentum and IBM. On 4 December 2002, both companies
issued press releases announcing their acquisitions of records
management companies - Documentum acquired TrueArc, and IBM
acquired Tarian. These acquisitions are particularly interesting,
because they blur the already unclear lines between software that
has been designed specifically for managing records, and more
generic document management software.
The records management software market
remains small in comparison to the wider CM market, although it has
the potential for growth over the coming years, as organisations
address the issues of accountability. The majority of vendors in
this market are small niche players that have a key role to play
due to their domain expertise. This list includes Tower Software,
OmniRIM, Impact Systems, eManage and Cuadra. The acquisitions of
TrueArc and Tarian present significant opportunities to these niche
vendors, as the two companies had important OEM partnerships within
the CM market.
However, IBM and Documentum are not the only
large vendors with specialist records management solutions; Open
Text and Hummingbird both entered the records management market
through acquisition in 1999, with Open Text acquiring PSSoftware,
and Hummingbird acquiring PC Docs. These vendors are all targeting
the larger organisation market through the inclusion of records
management in their wider enterprise CM offerings.
Software will only play a supporting role in
the overall solution of records management, but it is a vital part
of that solution
The question is whether systems such as
these are sufficient to solve the many records management problems
that exist in the new electronic era. With the quantity of
electronic records that are created today, simply keeping
everything is just not practical. Even though the cost of storage
is cheap, actually managing all that information is not. The
problem is complicated further as we try to understand the context
of all those records - how they relate to each other and to events
in time. As technology progresses, we can expect voicemails and
rich media to also become major factors in the records management
portfolio. However, how the content of voicemails can be managed
without listening to every one of them is a major hurdle in the
making.
No records management software vendor can
provide a complete solution to records management issues. The
solution will come through the implementation of procedures
designed to manage an organisation's specific records. Software
will only ever play a small supporting role in the overall solution
of records management, but it is a vital part of that solution.
For more information e-mail
info@ovum.com
www.ovum.com