Is It Time to Take The Spotlight Off Compliance?
Many public sector organizations, such as the US federal government, are actively researching and planning for the projected retirement bubble to hit, as the workplace demographic in many agencies and regulated industry shifts dramatically over coming years. Succession planning, capture of best practices and procedures, knowledge retention and management programs are all critical to the progress of public service and requires a core ECM/RM underpinning for optimal success.
Banking, insurance and retail organizations face constant pressures to keep and enhance the range of products and services they offer to clients. Rapid and accurate communication, protection of personal data and responsive customer service are core activities to this fundamental business objective. All ought to be underpinned by consistent content capture, management and retention technologies and appropriate best practices.
Utilities, local governments, mining and manufacturing enterprises often require extensive investment in long-term capital projects: building plants, facilities, roadways. The underlying engineering drawings, site surveys, vendor and contractor agreements often result from hundreds or thousands of man-hours and need to be protected, managed and preserved throughout their useful lifecycle...strong recordkeeping and content capture mandates that are not always driven by pure compliance pressures.
Government has long been on the forefront of developing standards for information handling and preservation, and public sector professionals have been subject to compliance mandates for decades. The US federal government has once again demonstrated leadership as it continues to transform internal best practices. The adoption of the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) in 2002 clearly articulated a new commitment to align information technology investments to clear and measurable agency objectives. The acquisition of technology for technology's sake is no longer an acceptable justification for expenditure. A major step forward in recognizing the specific role of records management was realized in December 2005, with the addition of an RM profile to the FEA. Private sector organizations can learn much from this model and its articulation of how to best position records management in the context of serving the business objectives of an organization, compliance being but one objective out of several.
Federal agencies are now mandated to analyze all proposed IT systems and understand where corporate records are output from those systems. Private sector organizations can benefit from this model of mapping information systems to the content that is taken in and pushed out during the course of business activities. Government's leadership in this area is valuable to commercial enterprises, as the types of records created, managed and retained often are highly sensitive or secure, and have a life-span longer than the technology systems which produce them. Compliance with government-specific mandates such as the Freedom of Information Act or the Paperwork Reduction Act is considered part of ongoing business and is viewed less often as an end-point objective outside of the context of citizen service.
Industry research by organizations such as AIIM and ARMA also continue to show leadership in content and records management areas beyond just compliance-driven retention rules. The corporate world is beginning to articulate requirements for interoperability of core content repositories and is now recognizing that information consumption and appropriate use/publication is as fundamental to an organization's ongoing growth and success as is meeting compliance objectives.
Good Records Management Transcends Mere Compliance
In the knowledge-based economy, the flow and use of information is critical to organizational success. Inextricably linking records management best practices and technologies with compliance mandates causes organizations to miss capitalizing on the top-line revenue benefits that good information control systems can bring to the table. High-value knowledge workers focusing on customer retention, intellectual capital development, research, writing and analysis can benefit tremendously from the knowledge retention and categorization capabilities that most ECM and RM systems bring to market. Enhancing responsiveness to customers, streamlining routine contract and correspondence creation activities, consolidating and securely publishing best practice and precedent archives, and providing a structured approach to corporate knowledge capture during periods of staff turnover and realignment are all tangible benefits that can contribute to an organization's revenue stream, as well as fulfilling back-end requirements mandated by industry, legal or internal retention requirements.
No, compliance is not dead. But it is time for organizations in the knowledge economy, as well as ECM vendors, to begin to revisit the context in which records management and knowledge capture technologies are deployed and measured. Well-articulated implementation objectives, including measurable productivity gains, user acceptance and usage, better control on content use, re-use and distribution as well as complying with external and internal disclosure and retention rules must all be weighted factors when defining project scope and success metrics.
Compliance should be viewed as a logical end result of the explicit value that an organization places on its internally created content and knowledge worker output. Compliance requirements cannot be viewed in a vacuum. Items of high value—financial information, customer communication, intellectual property—ought not be managed simply at the end of their lifespan because of external compulsion. Agile, successful and innovative organizations recognize that information is power that can be harnessed throughout its creation, revision, publication and consumption lifecycle. Records and content management best practices and technologies belong at every stage; not just during the finale.
Hummingbird Ltd. is a leading global provider of enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, enabling organizations to manage the lifecycle of enterprise content from creation to disposition. Hummingbird Enterprise™ solutions enable organizations to address critical business needs, such as information management, business continuity, compliance and risk mitigation. Please visit
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