The Record of the Year Goes to…

While driving to work today, I was enjoying the light traffic patterns and listening to a popular New York radio station listing the top ten records of 2009.  I thought this was ironic since most people today do not purchase records.  As the two disc jockeys were arguing over which record was better, I couldn’t help myself thinking about records in the corporate world.    

No Line on the Horizon…

Before you continue, please note I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV.  I have been in the information management and regulatory affairs industry for 13+ years and had countless conversations with companies regarding the exact definition of a record.  This term is often misused, misinterpreted, or sometimes over-hyped.  In simple terms, a record is evidence of an event related to an organization or business transaction: financial statement, accounting report, employee appraisal, copy of a signed mortgage application, medical x-ray, e-mail, Microsoft Office document, transaction history stored in the database, blogs, instant messages, and even audio and video files.

Unsurprisingly, it’s estimated that more than 90% of the records being created today are electronic – and the amount and formats of information being generated keeps growing.  The management of electronic records is an important and legitimate business issue.  How that information is controlled presents severe legal, technical, and business implications.  I recently heard a legal team say if the item is accessible, it’s admissible.  So, exactly how does the compliance officer of an organization ensure the proper maintenance of corporate records from the time they are created to their disposal in a cost-effective manner?  At the end of the day, it’s about controlling risk and balancing cost.

21^st Century Breakdown…

Over the last decade, companies spent an absurd amount of money deploying islands of records management solutions for their Electronic Content Management (ECM) repositories, data warehouses, file shares, physical paper records, and e-mail applications.  It turns out these remedies complicated matters even more and acted purely as band-aids to the underlying issue – the challenge of centrally controlling the creation, retention, access, and destruction of information as well as easily adopting to new rules and regulations.  These systems also resulted in redundant technologies with limited scalability and isolated functionality.

The E.N.D. (Energy Never Dies)…

As we move into 2010, the attitude and methodology to support the growing amount of information and manage the associated risk will change.  Most of the surveys in 2009 proved companies are already hard at work evaluating their information management strategies, global retention policies, and ability to meet ongoing eDiscovery obligations.  Information governance is a platform that enables the enforcement of corporate-based retention policies and processes across the entire IT infrastructure.  The framework provides authorized users simple access to content scattered across the organization – regardless of repository, platform, or format.  Now that’s what I call “Boom Boom Pow”.