An organization's
well being today depends in part on its ability to produce records on-demand,
recover deleted content, and prove that missing records or content were
disposed of according to the law. Companies must be able, at a corporate
level, to effectively manage policies for document/records retention,
archiving, and eventual destruction. While these policies can be done,
and have been done manually and in physical form, this can be an error
prone, increasingly expensive approach. In addition, audit fees, and director
and officer liability insurance have increased substantially. On the other
hand, the risks of non-compliance are even greater: SEC fines and sanctions,
shareholder lawsuits and litigation expenses, loss of reputation, and
even criminal prosecution. Executives must ensure that corporate-wide
strategies are properly executed and that enabling technology can support
compliance efforts.
A more strategic,
scalable, and operationally effective solution is an enterprise content
management (ECM) solution with a tightly integrated enterprise
records management solution. The integration of uniform policies for
retention, archive, and disposition of records through ERM with ECM provides
a comprehensive, scalable, end-to-end solution for the creation, version
control, security, and lifecycle management of content of all types, including
Web, documents, records, email, and digital assets, among others. Using
ECM - controlled repositories, process automation, content publishing,
collaboration, records management, and business integration - corporations
can better manage the risks of non-compliance and the operational costs
of compliance.
ERM can
give a company the tools it needs to comply with new regulations in a
cost-effective way. A complete ERM solution supports all record types-electronic,
physical, and email-and empowers companies to take the following actions:
- Establish
policies and procedures for identifying and protecting business-critical
records
- Execute
these policies and procedures in an automated and auditable fashion
- Capture
records from a variety of physical, electronic, email, and scanned image
sources
- Retrieve
and disseminate recorded information
- Store
and appropriately archive inactive records that need to be retained
for legal, fiscal, regulatory, or administrative reasons
- Implement
procedures for the timely, secure destruction of corporate records when
their prescribed retention periods elapse, ensuring information assets
do not become corporate liabilities
A sustainable
ERM solution must enable organizations to implement procedures for storage,
retrieval, dissemination, protection, preservation, and destruction of recorded
content associated with all business operations. When evaluating ERM vendors,
companies should ask whether they are able to accomplish basic tasks quickly
and easily:
- Develop
and edit a file plan (an organized hierarchy of files and folders)
- Identify
and save appropriate metadata (information about each record)
- Set up
accounts, groups, and access controls
- Define
retention and disposal policies
- Establish
audit trails and generate space utilization reports
- Handle
all types content as records (documents, web pages, emails, chats, etc.)
Companies are
increasingly aware of the importance of email as sensitive enterprise records,
and in some industries, such as financial services, are actually mandated
to treat email as formal records subject to retention, discoverability,
and archive regulations. A complete ERM solution can help make compliance
easier by performing the following tasks automatically:
- Archiving
inbound, outbound, and internal email messages in a scalable and secure
repository
- Applying
uniform enterprise-wide records management policies to archived messages
- Linking
messages with other content types in a searchable information repository
to improve customer service and employee productivity
- Applying
content intelligence and scanning so only appropriate emails are captured
as records
Organizations
must also be able to capture and classify records from a variety of different
sources throughout the enterprise, bringing them under the control of records
management policies and procedures. An effective ERM solution offers "records
integrators" to link records management capabilities with external content
sources without necessarily requiring that content to move. This offering
facilitates the classification and declaration of content stored on external
systems.
Deriving
optimal value from managed content, including records and archived email,
requires that the content be tagged and categorized. This enables accurate
organization, content association, improved search capabilities, and powerful
exception handling processes - essentially creating intelligent content.
The huge volume of records today, particularly in the form of email, limits
the feasibility of manually tagging and categorizing records.
Leading
ERM solutions offer automated metadata extraction and analysis of records,
including email, against a records management file plan. With this capability,
actionable metadata from new or existing records are identified automatically,
expediting information retrieval, supporting personalized content delivery,
and enabling business processes for notification and exception handling.
At many
organizations, physical records such as paper, microfilm, and magnetic
tape have accumulated over the years and pose a significant challenge
to retain and archive or to destroy. The physical storage space required
for these records and the personnel costs required to file and retrieve
them can be a burden. Companies should look for ERM solutions that can
apply uniform enterprise-wide records management policies to physical
records, helping to reduce storage costs and the time required for filing
and retrieval.
Finally,
for success in any compliance program, corporate-wide business policies
must be balanced with the need to provide employees with fast, effective
access to the right information at the right time. For instance, the organization
will need to define and specify certain information from certain departments
such as legal or finance, or certain individuals such as the CEO and CFO
as records that require a six year retention period, at which time those
documents should either be archived or in fact, destroyed. In other cases,
certain people will need to specify content as records as it crosses their
desk - electronic or otherwise. In addition, certain employees must be
able to find and retrieve required records with ease. In fact, this ability
to readily retrieve information is often part of the regulations. Companies
must insist on ease of use in any ERM solution. With ERM as part of a
comprehensive ECM solution, companies can develop and implement compliance
strategies that could potentially save enormous amounts of time, effort,
and money, as well as safeguard the intangibles of reputation and investor
confidence. They can benefit from integrated, enterprise-wide systems
that provide process automation and efficiencies, address end-user needs
for access to records and messages while ensuring adherence to corporate-wide
policies and mandates, all while meeting the business requirements of
records retention and disposition. Fortunately, the technology exists
to help you meet today's regulatory compliance challenges. The companies
that take the lead in corporate compliance - with best practices in ECM
and ERM - in the near future may take the lead in the global marketplace
as well.
»Learn
more about records management solutions that enable compliance by contacting
Image Data for a no-hassle Document Management Assessment.
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