RM For The Masses

That Large Elephant

Andy Moore: In the dim shadows cast by e-discovery and the new FRCP rules, over there in the corner, sits a huge pink elephant we haven’t talked much about yet: email. What’s up with that?

Krista Curtiss: Email is at the top of the list for pain points, due in part to the volume, but also due to its mixture of personal information, corporate data and quick, fleeting decisions. There’s no such thing as a "typical" email.

Dave Campbell: With email, there are three major factors: (1.) email is universal, and we ALL transport business-critical records in email; (2.) email is informal—people can say bad things; and (3.), it’s exploding in volume. So with all that in mind, IT is trying to determine which are the relevant bits, and how are those relevant items being captured and retained? Often, they are required to do this manually. So they have to piece together solutions and still produce information on demand in short periods of time. So there are incredible challenges. For example, the number-one issue our customers deal with is legal holds. If you can’t preserve evidence, that can kill your business. Companies don’t necessarily have to keep emails for a specific time, but they DO have to enforce any legal holds and defend their process for doing so. It’s all about having a defensible process in place that you can explain and back up.

But let’s say you declare to have a 90-day deletion policy on email. I guarantee, if you try to delete every copy of every email message, there’s still going to be a copy of it somewhere...in the content management system, in someone’s ‘rogue’ archive.

Cheryl McKinnon: As we all know, most people spend a third of the day sitting in their inbox. So on behalf of those companies that expect employees to capture and maintain emails as part of their records plan, it’s up to us vendors to make sure that capture capability is built into the user interface, so there is no apparent separation of systems...it should look natural, and be as easy to file an email into a retention-driven ‘bucket’ as it is to file it into a folder on Exchange. Most people already file their emails, so the behavior is already there in the workplace; we just need to make sure they have the right tools behind it to capture the record. Maintaining transparency is critical for both user adoption and in making sure the record is complete.

Krista Curtiss: All the user has to do is drag a file into a folder. All the metadata—retention schedule, what security it should have—is wrapped around the folder they dragged it into...they don’t do anything differently than they did before.

Galina Datskovsky: A different shift in thinking has occurred. There is a part of the population who believes that if we ‘keep everything,’ we can’t get in trouble through spoliation. I completely disagree with that. And due to new regulations (such as FRCP), people are starting to say ‘Let’s keep the bare minimum that we need. That way, in a legal discovery, we have less to worry about.’ I think it’s a good thing; I applaud the fact that people are re-thinking their position on retention. The recognition is far greater than it was, even a year ago.

Dave Campbell: But what about all that information that gets left behind in the person’s inbox? You still have the deletion problem, and you still have the auditability and compliance problem. There’s always going to be the risk that the person doesn’t move the email into the right place.

Galina Datskovsky: The trick is to provide a consistent view and governance control, even in a diversified environment (retail banking being an example). You can’t treat the automation cycle differently; if you don’t have consistency in the back-end systems, regardless of the origin of the information, governance becomes a very difficult task.

IT budgets might not be growing, which means that spending money ‘smartly’ is more important than ever. If you don’t have a plan for governance, it means you need more money for infrastructure, storage, more servers. If you keep everything forever, that means you have to create more indices, which means more effort, more hardware and more costs.

If you implement good governance policies, follow retention best practices, keep the information you need and purge the information you don’t need in accordance with compliance regulations, you can drive information costs down! And spend budgets in a smarter fashion.

Not Your Grandfather’s RM

The records manager role is indeed changing. He or she is no longer merely a cost center. Instead of a final-mile custodian of the dead and dying remnants of a document lifecycle, the records manager is now the steward of the intellectual and knowledge assets of the company. That’s a huge and extremely significant shift in the organizational landscape. Volcanic, even.

The accessibility and reuse of business knowledge is one of the basic tenets of knowledge management. And records management makes that possible. Said Johannes Scholtes, closing our talk: "If a company’s resources are properly maintained, a lawyer can cut-and-paste a contract rather than write it from scratch... an R&D department can save months by leveraging previous work... a salesperson can refer to other successful negotiations, and copy from them. Records management is the facilitator for knowledge management."

I couldn’t agree more.

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Dave Campbell
senior product marketing manager
Symantec
"What it comes down to is whether they (IT) understand what’s at stake. When we talk to an IT person in a non-regulated industry, I would say they’re aware of compliance because of the "Wall Street Journal", but I wouldn’t say it’s something that’s driving them…"

Krista Curtiss
marketing director North America
TOWER Software
"During the Y2K panic, a lot of people simply threw band-aids onto their systems. They didn’t take it as an opportunity to make their
organizations more efficient. I think this ‘compliance scare’ is another opportunity to motivate people to go beyond simple repair, and to really leverage the opportunity to make their organizations function better."

Galina Datskosky
senior vice president, development
business service optimization
CA (Computer Associates)
"The records manager role, especially in financial services organizations, HAS grown in stature tremendously. There’s a great recognition that these people should sit at the table with the C-level executives, that these are the people who keep us on track and on course."

Cheryl McKinnon
director, collaborative content management
Open Text
"The most visionary customers we deal with have formal information governance programs in place. They publish them right on their websites. They have governance committees that report directly to the board of directors."

Marko Saarinen
senior director, product and solution marketing
Fast Search & Transfer (FAST)
"Small- to medium-sized businesses spend a greater percentage of their budgets on compliance than big companies, mainly because they don’t take a holistic approach. They take on compliance in an ad hoc manner, addressing compliance requirements as they emerge and treating them with a ‘one-time’ or ‘just-in-time’ approach.

Dr. Johannes Scholtes
president and CEO
ZyLAB North America
"The companies who are not prepared probably won’t go bust tomorrow, or even next year, but if they DO get in trouble and they don’t have their records under control, it can make the difference between a company surviving in crisis or not surviving."