An Education in Records
What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You

But perhaps more effective is an approach that includes automation. "This is exactly the kind of company that needs to consider an automated information management system. And there are many ways to do it that aren’t extremely expensive or cost-prohibitive," promised Annie. "Automating your information management takes many of the choices away, creating much less risk."

Automation is not the only pry bar shaping the records management business. The role, and the stature, of the records manager has also changed dramatically. At the risk of insulting not only Annie, but about 11,000 ARMA members, I suggested that the stereotypical image of the records manager as a little old gray-haired lady in the basement with file cabinets has, in fact, disappeared. Could she, I asked, shed any light on the reason? (Then I cringed, waiting for the berating I deserved).

"No, it’s true," she laughed. "My take on that is: there is just too much information. It was never an easy job, but in the old days you had a finite amount of information, and it was just the stuff you created on paper. Or you had archaic customer-database systems, and all of it was pretty much contained in one place. You knew who created it; you knew where it was and you knew who had access to it.

"Now, there’s just s-o-o-o much. Email’s everywhere. Fileshares are everywhere. You’ve got SharePoint, which is so dynamic. These days, it’s much more burdensome and much more unruly. It can be difficult just to figure out what medium information is in, much less whether it should be considered a record or not."

So what’s the new version of the records manager? "It’s become much more collaborative. It’s no longer the job of one person to shepherd all information. There are simply too many data types and stores—and volume—across the organization. Because it’s spread all over, you have to have participation by many different groups of people. Many big organizations no longer have a records manager, per se," she said. "Instead, they have a records management team that includes IT people, legal people, and they are the ones tasked with what would have been traditionally records management issues. Those companies we were talking about earlier that NEVER had a records manager probably never will...they are moving toward a more collaborative team approach. They are taking into account the practical reality of how information is created and maintained in an organization."

I suggested that these team approaches sound nice at a management retreat in Arizona, but are in fact not really happening; the people who are supposed to "collaborate," don’t; they meet at the Christmas party and they don’t even know each other. "That’s true, but the fact is that most companies DO have a general idea of what information is relevant to their organization." In a way, I think Annie is saying, the team approach is far more reliable than the "expert records manager" approach, because you get a more holistic cross-breed of knowledge. "You need to determine what’s germane to the business AND determine what regulatory and legal requirements you have," she explained.

I guess she meant that it takes a multi-headed beast. It’s challenging to create a team approach, but it’s no more difficult than expecting a single person to create and implement a records management program for the entire organization without the collaboration of these other groups anyway.

"It’s a balance," she said. "You find out from the business users what it is they need. Then you determine the risk of doing what the business users want you to do. If they say they want to keep all information for 10 years, you may have to say ‘no.’ But you also have to explain why you’re saying ‘no,’ and that there are risks that you are not prepared to take.

"A lot of organizations don’t properly educate their employees. They often create policies in a vacuum, then roll them out without giving employees any context for why these decisions are made, or why it’s important they comply. The worst thing you can do is state that you have a policy, but you don’t enforce it. You can’t say in court you have a policy of deleting information after five years, then get into court and have the other side find information that hasn’t been properly disposed of. So education is key, and needs to be taken into account when you’re devising your retention plan and setting your policies," Annie said.

Sometimes "Worst Practices" Teach
I’ve had the happy opportunity to talk with Johannes Scholtes on this subject—records management—many times. There are few authorities on the subject I respect and trust as much as Jan.

But because we’ve always talked about "best practices" in records management, I suggested it might be fun to talk about some of the "worst practices." How can—and do—companies screw up?

"Oh, there are a lot of those," he laughed. "Probably even more than best practices. But very few make it into the news... probably because people are so embarrassed about them."

He continued: "I’ve seen evidence rooms filled up with water from plumbing leaks. Another time I saw a company that kept all their records in the basement next to an open sewer system..." (Just so you know, he went on with that story, but in the interest of keeping my lunch down, I will leave it to your imagination.)

"But from a more common point of view, we still see companies with people who have 40,000 emails in their inbox. That’s a sign of somebody not having their act together. These are the people who aren’t taking the responsibility to do what they’re supposed to. Or you have to ask them four times before they do it," he said.

I asked if that was the fault of a manager who wasn’t articulating and enforcing the rules...or are some people just lazy?

"Yeah, I think it’s their nature, because it’s always the same people who have this problem. They’re the same people whose desk is always a mess." (I’m starting to worry if Jan had some sort of Web camera aimed at me.) "There are also people who are very structured who clean up their stuff and have everything under control," underscoring one of the more interesting and aggravating characteristics of human beings: You. Just. Can’t. Trust. Them.

Because of the unpredictable nature of people, Jan continued, "a lot of companies are moving toward not depending on their people to do records management at all, but instead are adopting more automated ways," echoing Annie’s comments earlier. "There are fairly easy ways to automate the disposition of old emails, for example. There are programs for document creation that ask you up front: What’s the filing policy on this? That seems to be the best approach," Jan continued. "Ask the person at the time they create a document or an email: What is this? Is it a record? Is it related to a case matter? Then the retention date and disposition plans can be automatically applied and carried out."

One interesting topic that came up during a recent KMWorld magazine roundtable (find it at http://www.kmworld.com/Webinars/) is the distinction between the way "large matters" are handled differently from "small matters." I asked Jan whether small matters are ever ignored in the pursuit of focusing on the more substantive cases?

"Oh, no, no, no," he insisted. "A large publicly traded company files thousands of cases a year. 90% to 95% of those are small cases. They might have 10 really nasty cases. The large, nasty cases get a lot of attention, of course, but they are also where they apply service providers and rely on their law firms. Right now, 50% to 75% of all the costs of litigation and discovery are in these large cases," Jan explained.

"But the number of small cases is increasing, and this is where they feel the law firms don’t really add that much value. The companies would rather do those themselves, perhaps with contract lawyers. So the majority of the costs for litigation is shifting to small cases. So the impetus to automate the in-house litigation support is growing tremendously."

(Jan tells me a typical scenario would be where an employee is in some kind of trouble, and the company is subpoenaed to provide information about that employee. In that case, the company itself is not part of the case, but is required to provide discovery material. He didn’t say it, but I’m thinking about messy divorce cases or child-support, where the court wants to know how much the employee earns, for instance.)

So I prodded Jan a little bit more regarding "worst practices" in records management. "The worst records management EVER was the UBS Warburg case," he said without hesitation.

I already knew a little about the debacle, but in the spirit of accuracy and, frankly, typing fatigue, I excerpted this also from Wikipedia (hey, it’s summer in Maine...I can take a little break):