Several of the major corporations that I’ve spoken to recently with ongoing records management projects have told me that they’re trying to adopt a three-tier information governance strategy:
- Critical/Vital records which need to be closely managed for extended periods of time.
- Work-in-Progress, which needs to be kept for the medium term, as it may become a record, although it may also prove to be of low value.
- Unstructured information with low or zero business value, such as emails about the after-work social event. Commonly referred to as “digital landfill”, this is the stuff that costs in storage and hampers efficient discovery.
Of course, the challenge remains: “how to identify what data falls into which group?” Every organisation, but especially those of a larger scale, also faces the challenge of how to get their staff to recognise the need for, and actually implement, the activities on which this classification relies for success.
Given that even the most buoyant economy does not allow for extensive resources to be allocated to such activities, any such classification needs also to be as automated as possible, as easy as possible, and as productive as possible.
To my mind, the solution lies firstly, in a well defined and appropriate classification schema – the correctly sized and named ‘buckets’ for the information at hand. Secondly, as simple as possible a profile of metadata to accompany the information through the various stages of its lifecycle – No one likes filling meaningless data fields.
Thirdly, consider how integrated archive, DMS/ECM and Records Systems can manage the transition from work-in-progress to document of record – possibly automatically, and across multiple repositories. Set up a cascade of buckets with filtered holes to do the hard work of transference from one tier to another.
Finally, “bite the bullet” and impose what might appear a draconian policy of deletion of the spurious, low value information, unless it has been allocated to a work-in-progress category. If this is automated by file or email system services, staff will soon learn to play ball!
And what about the mountains of legacy information residing on file shares and in messaging systems? It very much depends on the nature of your business and the business area under consideration and it should be an objective, risk-based decision, but rarely can retrospective review of historical repositories be economically justified, particularly as those doing the review commonly have little knowledge of the nature and context of the information. However, automated mechanisms are improving all the time....