RSD

Observations from the ACC Annual Meeting

Hello from Denver! We are wrapping up our presence at this year's annual meeting of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC). Early season snowflakes are flying, and conference attendees may end up spending a day or so more in Denver than originally planned. No time better than now to post some thoughts on the last three days.

We’ve not sponsored a booth, reception, or water cooler at ACC before. And while I’ve had numerous conversations with inside counsel (Chief Legal Officers, General Counsel, Assistant General Counsel, etc.) over the last year or so, I’ve never had the opportunity to talk to so many of these individuals at one time. I had dozens of interesting conversations with conference attendees, and learned quite a bit in the process.

Lesson 1: e-Discovery is not the issue I thought it was

One of the significant benefits of adopting an information governance solution like RSD GLASS is a significant, even measurable improvement in e-Discovery efficiency. And this makes sense. RSD GLASS provides a single source of search and access to governed records. These records are those most likely to be requested in the event of litigation, and / or those most likely to be scrutinized as a result of a compliance audit. By placing these records under governance ensures that records are managed in accordance with policy and relevant statutes, which likely results in a dramatic decrease inthe sheer volume of content to be searched and evaluated for potential relevancy. Counsel have a single solution for searching, accessing, and placing litigation holds on this content, across all governed repositories. The efficiency comes from not having to repeat the same search and hold process across countless file plans, repositories, and jurisdictions.

I thought this was going to be a compelling message for this audience. By and large, I was mistaken. Most of the attendees I spoke with already had an e-Discovery solution in place, in parallel with existing records management solutions and technologies. Some had spent significant sums of money purchasing and implementing these solutions, and most were still in the process of doing so. But the majority of conversations I had suggested that these folks were pleased with their e-Discovery solution, or, if not, had the expectation that they eventually would be happy with it.

The logical next step in this discussion is how information governance changes the way companies approach e-Discovery.

Lesson 2: "Information Governance" is a relatively empty label for this crowd

I am fond of describing RSD GLASS as an information governance platform. This allows me to expound on our unique approach to information governance, and also calls out the fact that RSD GLASS is more than a simple application or solution. As well it should be, given the complexities of the business and technical challenges it addresses.

Therefore, in answer to the question, “So what does RSD do?” I began by explaining how RSD GLASS solves information governance challenges, including multi-jurisdictional policy development, cross-repository enforcement, and secure information access. I was surprised at how poorly the topic of information governance resonated with inside counsel. In deepening the conversation, I learned that corporate counsel tends not to get inolved in solving information governance challenges. It's not so much that any of these individuals felt that these benefits were unimportant; no attorney is going to say that policy enforcement is unimportant (although many admit that, nevertheless, their company does not abide by its retention schedule). Rather, it is simply a matter of priorities. They told me their primary interest is in securing the tools, assets, resources and information they need to respond to litigation. This focus is singular and narrow, in sharp contrast to the global perspective addressed by information governance.

The good news is that, well, when it comes to helping handle litigation, we have good news for them as well. And this benefit opened a few eyes this week.

Lesson 3: Defensible Disposition is really, really difficult

RSD GLASS is a significant factor in establishing a legally defensible disposition program. Consider the position of corporate counsel who has implemented RSD GLASS. The conversation with the court can go something like this:

Court: “Give us all records related to this litigation.”

Corporate Counsel of an RSD GLASS Customer: “We have some records related to the matter, but not all of them.”

Court: “Why don’t you have everything that has been requested?”

RSDGCC: “Because we have a corporate information governance policy in place. We have enforced this policy on our records, regardless of their potential relevance to this matter. In fact, here are the full audit trails that show what policy was in place at the time these records were declared, and how the policy was enforced not just on these records you requested, but all records. Disposition is not haphazard; we consistently enforce our policy.”

Court: “Well then. Let’s proceed with what we’ve got.”

100% of the corporate counsel I spoke with these first two days of ACC were unable to have this conversation, because their corporate records management policy is either sporadically enforced, or not enforced at all.

100% of the corporate counsel I spoke with these first days of ACC wished they could have this conversation with the court. These people will greatly benefit from an information governance solution like RSD GLASS.

Lesson 4: Corporate Counsel are resourceful people

As we did last week with ARMA, we sponsored a hybrid scavenger hunt / marketing campaign around RSD GLASS. Conference attendees had the opportunity to come by the booth and grab buttons. Each button had a letter on it: G, L, A, or S. The first group of five who could spell GLASS all won iPads. We had no winners on the first day. In fact, given the audience, this was somewhat problematic, as we were accused of rigging the game, and not distributing a required letter. “We are litigators… a class action suit may result here, if you don’t have any winners.”

Yesterday morning, around 11:00 AM, we finally had our winning group. It started with a single individual who had not previously heard of RSD or our iPad giveway promotion, but quickly understood that the point of the exercise was an interactive one. Find others, whether you know them or not, and get them invested in the promotion. She recruited a handful of others, who then traded business cards and contact information. Within an hour or so, this group of strangers spelled out GLASS. iPads for five! They celebrated with much enthusiasm. It was fascinating to watch this group network.

Congrats to our winners, and thanks everyone for stopping by the booth.

Governing Content on File Shares – Having Your Cake, and Eating It Too

Our customers come to us with a dizzying array and variety of Information Governance challenges. Many customers have unique needs… for example, one of our European customers has asked that we help them govern specific set of physical records: prototype parts created by their suppliers and R&D division, and stored away somewhere in crates in a large warehouse. (After all, not all physical records are documents.) We've also been asked to provide a governance solution for CAD Designs, Audio / Visual Records, and multi-component records comprised of many forms and supporting documents (discrete records in their own right).

Although there are often unique requirements such as these, there is also a consistent set of challenges voiced by nearly every customer and prospect we visit. These include:

• Multi-jurisdictional policy development
• Repository-agnostic policy enforcement
• Cross-repository search and records access

A significant percentage of our customers and prospects (95% or more) tell us that at least two of these issues are high-visibility challenges they must solve in the next year. RSD GLASS represents a unique approach companies are using today to address these problems. Customers, partners, and friends of RSD already know this, so I won’t go into much detail today* on how we solve these Information Governance challenges. 

* - That said, if you are new here, why not take a look at our webinars and other resources. Lots of good stuff there.

Rather, there is a common request I am hearing these days, and I would like to take a moment to explore it in depth. The question goes something like this: “Can you help us govern our content on our network and file shares?”

Peel That Onion, Try Not To Cry

On its face, the requirement seems harmless enough. The organization has some "stuff" on its network, network-addressable storage devices, and local C: drives. They want to apply their retention schedule to it. Unfortunately, when I start asking questions, and they look at the problem a little more closely, they often realize there are some unspoken requirements behind this request:

1. Little-to-no disruption. They usually want to govern the content in place. After all, legal and business users know where to find things on the network. (Don’t they?)
2. They want to automatically classify content. This means scrubbing metadata (which is file system metadata, not record metadata) and document content to infer whether it is a record or not. If a given document or file is a record, classify it according to the corporate taxonomy of records, and apply and enforce the appropriate retention. This is an especially important requirement for customers who have a poor sense as to what records are on their network.
3. Once a document is declared as a record, they want to block attempts to edit or delete the record outside of our governance platform. That is, they want to prohibit a user or system administrator from accidentally (or not) modifying or deleting the record from within the file system itself.

At this point in the conversation, the innocuous little request to govern content on file shares is now revealed to be a much more complex problem than first thought. On the one hand, the customer wants to employ all the necessary governance controls to meet regulatory and legal obligations. On the other hand, they want things to be exactly as they are today. What's so hard about that?

“One Word Can Really Bring You Round – Changes”

 The complexity behind the problem is the same problem ECM originally was supposed to help solve: the network / file share environment is inherently un-governable, from a Records Management perspective. Without specific and potentially very costly IT project work and ongoing administration, the required governance controls to identify, classify, and manage records is simply not possible at a technical level. More simply, a document or folder on a network can be changed or deleted. A record residing on a network or C: drive is not immutable. If it is not immutable, it is not a record.

And the Court will not admit it as such.

So Can This Be Done?

Thankfully, there are solutions. I’ve already suggested the most common solution: ask IT to solve it. IT defines and administers a set of permissions that describe who can read / write / access various drives and network directories where records may reside. They then trust their users (or their chosen auto-categorization technology) properly classify records. IT then applies the appropriate retention periods to these records, using a very small number of categories. To help, the network directory may mirror the taxonomy of corporate records. Enforcement is manual, entrusted to the IT / Network Administrator who periodically purges records with expired retention periods. The Audit Trail is the network log.

I’ve met a customers who have taken this approach; a few can make it work. Cost and complexity of administering such a program increase exponentially as they incorporate more than a few record types, business units, and / or jurisdictions. It can only work in relatively simple, localized, highly-cohesive environments, whose records are rarely, if ever subject to e-Discovery requests or litigation holds.

Most of the companies we talk to don’t fall in any of these categories. The records environment is complex. They lack unlimited IT and network administration budgets. IT and Records Management do not always work in lockstep. They are in highly regulated or litigious verticals. Their needs make it impractical or outrageously expensive to employ network technology as the RM enforcement mechanism. They know this; that’s why they bring us in.

From our perspective, we prefer to take a step back, and examine this question as a business / cultrual one, not a technology one. We examine why they want to maintain records on the network. We remind our customers that, in all likelihood, much of what resides on the network is probably not a record. Then we focus on the small subset of documents that truly are records, and develop an Information Governance program that:

• Prevents the unwanted or unintentional editing or deletion of records
• Allows authorized access
• Automatically (if desired) enforces appropriate lifecycle actions, including declaration, disposition, and a whole host of intermediate actions between these milestones as required by privacy statutes and other policies
• Provides corporate counsel with defensible disposition, showing when, how, and why records were disposed
• Allows litigation holds to be placed on records, thereby freezing the lifecycle of potentially relevant records
• Maintains an audit trail of all actions

The specifics of how these benefits are achieved differ from one implementation to the next. It may be necessary to move records (or a subset of records) to a traditional repository that supports these types of governance controls. RSD GLASS includes a component specifically designed for providing business and legal users the secure cross-repository search and access they expect.

In other environments, the benefit of this kind of migration does not justify the cost of moving records. Instead, these customers ask us to leave those records in place, but still calculate and transmit lifecycle action messages that are then manually enforced by the relevant administrator. To ensure appropriate governance, we can require to manually verify that they have performed the required actions, and record this verification in the Audit Trail.

Often, we take a blended approach: migrating some records to be governed in a repository, and enabling manual governance on the remainder of records left on the network. The openness of our platform and repository-agnostic approach gives us great flexibility to architect the right solution. In the end, we can meet the needs and govern records currently residing on the network.

It’s just a little more complicated than it first seems.

Information Governance - What's The Point, Anyway?

Months in the making, we have finally reached the last entry in our epic, 3-part series mapping the retail best practices with a comprehensive Information Governance Program. (If you missed the first entries in the series, please take a look at the Introduction, then parts One and Two. Go ahead. We’ll wait.)

Having done the hard work of creating the centralized corporate policy, including applicable jurisdictional variances, and putting in place the infrastructure required to support it in the field, one might be persuaded that the rest of the program falls neatly into place as a matter of course. After all, that’s hard work, those first two phases. It involves a lot of people, including executives at the highest levels of the organization. Doesn’t the inertia generated by the sheer mass of the effort pull the project across the finish line?

Indeed, that was one of my takeaways from last month’s MER Conference… there was little to no discussion about what to do after you have defined and rolled out your RM / IG policy. Instead, session after session focused on how hard it is to get to that point in the first place. MER attendees left well-versed on the complexities of defining and enforcing retention schedules, and how difficult it is to overcome these using traditional RM approaches. There was no information on what to do next, or even why to go about this sort of thing in the first place. I would argue that the next step in this process is the most crucial, yet most neglected phase of the program: making content available to the people who require it.

Why Go To The Store?

As we’ve done in the previous entries in this series, let’s first consider the question from the retail point of view. The whole point in going through the heavy lifting of creating useful and easily navigable store layouts and then rendering those models into physical locations was to make it possible for customers to find what they want and purchase it. Consider the customer expectations… First and foremost, they expect to be able to find what they are looking for without needing help. This means the environment should be logically organized from THEIR perspective. They expect a safe, clean, and, better yet, visually appealing environment. They expect appropriate enforcements to be in place to ensure safety, collect taxes, and enforce age restrictions on the purchase of governed content such as firearms and prescription drugs. Finally, they expect the products they find to be of good quality, at a fair price.

There are some secondary audiences to be accommodated… company representatives will periodically visit the store to do inventories and ensure compliance with corporate standards. Government inspectors may also visit from time-to-time to ensure compliance with health and safety laws.

Each of these constituencies will have a satisfactory experience if the retailer has been sufficiently diligent in the earlier phases of the project. Successful retailers understand this. Those who fail to deliver on their customers’ expectations soon find themselves out of business.

The Expectations of the Information Governance Consumer

Who is the Information Governance Consumer? Say it with me, now: “EVERYONE!” (Don’t forget this; it will be important later.) The entire company is responsible for, and benefits from, good Information Governance practices. Having narrowed the target audience down thusly, let’s talk about what the Information Governance Consumer’s expectations should be.

In short, they should have the same expectations as a retail customer. They should be able to quickly and easily find the information they need (assuming they have the appropriate rights to it). They expect to have this access without having to go too far out of the way for it… that is, it should be available within the context of their day to day business activities. They expect the information to be relevant, high-quality, and specific to their needs. They should also expect that appropriate lifecycle actions are performed on the information as required by law, industry best practices, or internal standards and guidelines. If something is supposed to be moved or deleted, it should be.

Unfortunately, the Information Governance Consumer is usually frustrated. Too often, they:

• Cannot quickly and easily find the information they need, whether they have access to it or not.
• Use search engines hopelessly clogged with irrelevant or out-of-date entries.
• Have to go well out of their way to get the information they need.
• Must sift through rows and rows of records to find something relevant to the task at hand.

We have failed to meet the needs of the Information Governance Consumer. (And who, again, is the Information Governance Consumer? That’s right, everyone.)

Where Did We Drop The Ball?

The cause of these difficulties is simply identified, but difficult to address. Let’s review.

1. Define a central policy for managing corporate information, including jurisdictional variances as needed.
2. Create an infrastructure for managing that information in the field in accordance with the policy.
3. Deliver this governed content to the consumers who require it.

The failure occurs in step 3. The traditional Records Management approach abdicates this responsibility, and lays it at the feet of technology vendors to provide access to the content in their repositories. This means that business users, auditors, corporate counsel, and others who need access to the information must do so in a repository-specific manner. In practice, this means two things: first, they need to know where the information is; second, given the where, they need to know how to get it.

Would we do this to a retail customer? Would we organize an entire store according to brand?

“All the Nike stuff goes in this section… shoes, golf clubs, and apparel. All the Yamaha stuff goes over there, motorcycles, boat engines, and pianos.”

Or worse, by delivery mechanism (distributor)?

“Take everything off the next truck that arrives, and dump it in that corner. The customers will figure out what they want.”

If we set up a store with this mindset, customers would visit once and leave in frustration, never to return. We’d be out of business immediately. And yet, this is exactly what we expect out of our Information Governance Consumer.

The solution, of course, is to replicate the model proven by our friends in the retail industry. Remove the technology component from information access. Replace it with a repository agnostic search capability that can be easily embedded within the context of existing line-of-business applications, GUI’s, and / or portals. Business Consumers, such as customer service or field sales representatives, will never again have to consider which repository to search when looking for a given record. Legal counsel would not need a separate E-Discovery Tool, nor repository / platform specific means for searching through content and placing a litigation hold on potentially relevant records. Compliance and audit teams can use the same platform to ensure that information is being managed in accordance with standard laws and regulations. Lifecycle actions, such as disposition, removal of personally identifiable information, and transfers between repositories or storage tiers, can be tied to automated events generated by external systems, and automatically enforced. In this way, the beneficiaries of a comprehensive Information Governance program are actually ahead of their retail peers. They’d love to be able to automatically dispose of expired food and medication sitting on their shelves.  

To many of you, this state may seem implausible, an ideal state to be realized well in the future. ”How can I be sure my file plan is an accurate reflection of my policy? How can I account for the jurisdictional variances in relevant laws and regulations? How can I automatically enforce lifecycle actions across my repositories, while providing secure, fast, and simple access to information?”

This is exactly the value proposition behind RSD GLASS, our patent-pending Information Governance Platform. It’s a unique, revolutionary approach. Our customers are realizing these benefits today.

Want to learn more? We did a webinar last week on this very topic. Or, just give us a holler.

The MER Rookie

The MER Conference was held in my backyard this past week. Hordes (well, hundreds) of industry experts descended upon Michigan Avenue and generally behaved themselves, much as you’d expect of a group of people with graduate degrees in Library Sciences.

We did not host a booth this year. Rather, we sponsored the MER Podcast Series. A number of my RSD colleagues had previously attended a dozen or MER Conferences, and recommended it enthusiastically. I’m glad they did. I attended a Pre-Conference Tutorial, and as many Case Studies and Panel Discussions as I could manage. Here are a couple of observations from a MER Rookie.

Orthodox Records Management 101

My Pre-Conference Tutorial was the AIIM Electronic Records Management Practitioner Certificate Program, facilitated by former Marine Drill Sergeant and Professional Chocolate Connoisseur Jessie Wilkins. For me, this was a useful and thoroughly welcomed introduction into traditional Records Management principles. It provided a nice foundation for the rest of the week’s sessions, as well as important context for my conversations with customers and prospects steeped in these concepts. This is exactly what I expected from this tutorial, and I was glad to get it.

What I was unprepared for was the extent to which the rest of the conference continued to beat on the same themes. In fact, a template for speaker abstracts might go something like this: “Tried and true RM practices will likely suffice, so long as you account for (insert session topic here).” More specifically, I heard the following specific tenets of orthodox RM in multiple sessions:

• Define a small number of very general and highly inclusive buckets of records. It’s just too hard to expect people to adhere to complex retention schedules.
• Manual retention enforcement means RM’s must be diligent about reminding people of the policy, and why they should be adhering to it.
• Event-driven retention, though useful, is very difficult. Instead, apply a broad time-based retention period that will likely meet your intent, even if that means over-retaining some content.
• Auto-classification doesn’t work well for unstructured content, regardless of what the vendors say. RM’s will spend more time reclassifying improperly classified content than they would have spent manually classifying it (or asking users to do so) in the first place.

To this MER Rookie, the irony was obvious: on the one hand, stay with the tried-and-true RM approaches. On the other, these approaches don’t address:

• Accounting for applicable laws, regulations, industry best practices, and internal standards and guidelines.
• Enforcing jurisdictional variances on these mechanisms.
• Making content readily and securely available for business users.
• Applying those policies across a heterogeneous landscape of repositories.

At the risk of channeling Solomon on you, is there nothing new under the sun? In fact, in the few instances where any of these items were mentioned, the speaker or panel did so in the context of how difficult it is to solve these problems. For example, I did hear Julie Gable mention that the future of RM is automatic enforcement of policy… but even here, she left me with the sense that she wistfully regarded this as an ideal future state we may reach some day, shortly after we solve cold fusion and everybody has flying cars.

Records Managers as Salespeople

This theme cut across multiple sessions; there was no single session (that I am aware of) dedicated to this topic. In a nutshell, the takeaway for me was that RM’s need to constantly sell their organization and colleagues on the value of adherence to good RM principles. The difficulty here is that people, including executives, legal, and accounting professionals who should know better, are predisposed to over-retain their records. “Abide by the retention schedule” is not something people want to hear.

In the past, the sales message has been focused on the doom and gloom side. “If we don’t behave ourselves here and consistently apply our retention schedule, bad things will happen.” I sensed widespread agreement that there needs to be a positive side to this message, focusing on improved competitiveness or operational efficiency. I found no information on how to build a business case around this, except for the usual mention of reducing storage costs. In Teresa Drabenstadt’s outstanding session on a RIM Program she helped institute at CUNA Mutual, she cited some impressive storage cost savings as a key benefit. Otherwise, the storage argument seemed unpersuasive to me.

The best friend RM’s have in this process is an enlightened, supportive, and empowered executive sponsor. Indeed, every successful case study mentioned executive support as a key factor. NOBODY, however, had any insight into how to get your executive team on board with an RM / IG program, if the idea wasn’t spawned at the executive level in the first place. Failing this, the best an RM can hope for is incremental improvement in adherence to the retention schedule.

Next Year

I’m absolutely looking forward to returning to MER next year. However, knowing what I know from this year’s conference, I think it may also be beneficial for me as an individual and RSD as a company to assume the role of friendly agitator. MER, and the field of Records Management, needs this. In my informal conversations with fellow attendees, I sensed frustration in the lack of new messages and themes.

As a MER Rookie and RSD employee, I am not disappointed by this. If anything, it is further confirmation of our strategy and positioning of RSD GLASS. After this week, I’m more convinced than ever that our approach is unique and revolutionary. I believe an RSD GLASS customer success story will make for a useful and informative Case Study session.

We are well positioned to lead the conversation away from the shortcomings and pitfalls of traditional Records Management approaches. We’d rather focus on the benefits of a repository agnostic Information Governance platform on which you can define fine-grained, multijurisdictional policies that account for laws and regulations, and automatically enforces these in your file plans.

It's Alive! It's Alive!!

(This is the second in a three part discussion on Information Governance. For the first part, see What's So Special About Lebanon, Kansas.)

Sorry for the delay in posting the continuation of our series here. It’s been a crazy time for us at RSD. Since last time, we’ve visited customers in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Washington DC, and Texas, sharing our vision for Information Governance. Our message is getting a lot of traction among our existing customer base, and also with potential new customers. Oh, and did you read our Peugeot Press Release? You did, right? We promise there will be more to come.

Last time, we hypothesized a retail enterprise, and imagined how they might create and validate one or more standard store templates. The science behind developing these models is well-established and sophisticated, and frankly beyond the ken of regular folks like me. Our retailer accounted for laws, regulations, union rules, architectural demands, and a number of other constraints, and defined a corporate template for how their store should be organized. Their next step, and the topic of this entry, is how they'd begin building stores in accordance with their template(s).

As it turns out, this process closely parallels that which Information Governance Steering committees take in building out a corporate Information Governance model. They:

• Define a standard policy, including the hierarchy of corporate information, metadata, and fine-grained retention schedules on all the above.
• Define required jurisdictional variances on the policy, as required by law, internal standards and guideliness, industry best practices, or all the above.
• Engage required constituencies to validate the policy.

This is fun and wonderful, and may even impress friends and neighbors at cocktail parties. However, it’s also absolutely worthless unless you translate the abstract corporate vision into something tangible and useful.

Making the Model Come Alive

From this point, our hypothetical retailer would take those models and templates, and build stores according to the standards they describe. There may be several such models… perhaps different layouts for small, medium, and large stores… urban settings versus suburban or rural… maybe even variations that account for regional variances in distribution patterns or partners. Living, breathing people would take an empty warehouse, and, in accordance with centrally defined standards, add lighting, shelves, coolers, counters, registers, and other services required by customers as they shop.

At RSD, we are proud of IG policy engine. It’s very intuitive, and provides a means for defining, validating and publishing multi-jurisdictional policies. An important competitive differentiator for us is the ability to take these policies and create jurisdiction-specific (and / or business unit specific) File Plans from them. Imagine…

• … handing over to Records Managers and business users the information they specifically need, and only the information they specifically need. All content is relevant and actionable.
• … their reaction to having fine-grained validated retention schedules pre-built into those File Plans, rather than defined and implemented in a separate technology or medium. (And yes, metadata, I am looking at you, too.)
• … being able to automatically enforce the lifecycle actions that have been defined in those policies.
• … being able to define and enforce lifecycle actions on record metadata independently from record content.
• ... enforcing those lifecycle actions automatically. If you are into that sort of thing.

Our RSD GLASS customers are doing all of this today.

In many ways, those responsible for managing File Plans with our Information Governance platform are doing the same work as the workers building stores. They take a corporate vision and make it a reality. In short, they are taking the centrally defined standard, and making it come to life.

All that’s necessary for our imaginary retailer to start making money is to deliver desired goods and services to consumers. For that, they…

Ah, but I get ahead of myself.

What's So Special About Lebanon, Kansas?

If you are from Lebanon, Kansas (I'm not), you already know the answer to my question. Don't spoil it for everyone else. The rest of you will have to read through this entry to find out. No scrolling please.

I mentioned a week or so ago that I would be posting a three-part series, introducing Information Governance in terms that are familiar to anyone who has ever walked into a retail establishment. This, hopefully, means just about everyone. Welcome, then, to Part One: Define Centrally.

The Ad Hoc Approach

You may remember from last time that my first high school job was in a local pharmacy. Shortly after I was hired, I received a thorough and just scolding from a Regional Vice President for questioning the layout of our store. At the end of his lecture, he asked a rhetorical question, wondering if I’d prefer out customers go shopping in a street bazaar. As obtuse as the question seems in retrospect, it’s worth considering about his analogy a little more deeply.

There are some advantages to the street bazaar approach. First, it works. People have bought goods and services this way for over 4,000 years. Second, it requires very little administrative oversight, except for the informal enforcement of locations between vendors. Transactions between vendors and customers can be conducted in whatever manner and terms are required by the two parties. One transaction may be completed with hard currency. The next... two chickens. What's not to like?

It’s a good thing this works without oversight, because if you wanted to enforce standards on this process (as a regulatory agency might), you wouldn’t be able to. Other disadvantages are obvious:

• It doesn’t scale beyond the local market.
• Consumers have a hard time finding what they are looking for, unless they know exactly where it is.
• It’s inherently un-measurable.

For these and probably a dozen other reasons, no corporate retailer would ever go to market with this kind of strategy.

Or would they?

Historically, many companies have approached Information Governance using an ad-hoc process. We've all heard the horror stories: Policies in a Microsoft Word document, printed, and pinned to the Record Manager’s cubicle. Policies produced by an outside consultant, who left them in a three-ring binder that, invariably, is "around here somewhere".

I submit that companies approaching Information Governance using an ad-hoc approach tacitly accept many of the same risks as a retailer might in selling goods through a street bazaar. It's needlessly complex, and impossibly difficult to measure and audit. Woe unto your poor business and legal users, who have a very tough time finding what they are looking for. Unless they know exactly* where it is.

* - This sort of domain knowledge has historically been an important value-add for Records and Knowledge Managers. Unfortunately, these ad-hoc demands have taken RM’s away from providing real value to their organization: a strategic overhaul of the inefficient and unsustainable process. As a Records Manager recently told me, “I’m too busy doing my day job to do what I was hired to do.”

Customers have told me they had no means for central policy definition. Instead, they let individual jurisdictions and business units define their own policies, and manage their own content as they see fit. This siloed approach is more common than you may think, and usually results in significant complexity, redundancy, and inefficiency.

Ask yourself: does your corporate taxonomy have thousands upon thousands of Record Classes? How many of those are redundant, sharing the same structure, metadata and retention schedules? How did we allow this to happen? (Hold that thought.)

I am pleased to say that most companies we meet with have evolved from a purely ad-hoc process, and have begun to place some structure around their approach to Information Governance. They have identified their exposure to risk. They are defining policies at a corporate level. The most forward-thinking of these companies have established an Information Governance Steering Committee, tasked with defining the vision for their IG Program. These customers are adopting our approach for standardizing the definition, management, and enforcement of information governance policies across their enterprise.

Like a retailer who has built or procured space and begun building their proverbial four walls, companies who have begun this journey already have the boundaries within which they will build out their Information Governance model. They’re ready to move to the next step, and build the infrastructure.

Brick by brick, the structure takes place. Photo courtesy of cdharrison via Flickr.

Developing a Standard

As I described last week, retailers spend considerable amounts of resources defining how their stores should be laid out. Multiple considerations factor in this decision, such as:

• Traffic flow into, within, and out of the location
• Governmental regulations, such as those defining accessibility guidelines and safe keeping of product and equipment
• Consumer preferences

Out of these activities, they generate a shockingly large number of rules. Things like:

• Don’t put food in the same aisle as pet supplies.
• Milk and other dairy products should go in the back of the store, so people who come in to only buy a gallon of milk will be forced to walk by other merchandise, thereby increasing the odds they’ll buy more than they intended.
• Conversely, high-revenue eye candy goes in front. Why does Home Depot place riding lawn mowers in the front of their stores? So that they can’t be missed. You came in for light bulbs; you left with a John Deere. And light bulbs.

These rules become the basis for a corporate standard for a retail layout. Once the standard structure is devised, it goes through many approval layers before becoming a standard template for store organization. They may produce several standards… for example, templates for urban, suburban, and rural locations. As feedback comes from remote locations, templates are constantly revised in accordance with changing market conditions.

This was my understanding of how this process worked 20 years ago. I’m told little has changed since, except retailers understand the science better than they did then. I’m happy to hear from experts on this topic, to confirm or correct my understanding.

If you are a frequent visitor here… if you have met with us, and / or attended many of our Information Governance webinars and events… you are already thinking about the parallels in the discipline of Information Governance. Information Governance begins at the corporate level, where companywide standards for information are devised. What is your information? What is the difference between information and a record? Where is it stored? Who can access it? What is the lifecycle that each record class undergoes? Who needs to be involved in the lifecycle stages? What about metadata?

These discussions should include Corporate Records Managers, Compliance Officers, Legal Counsel, representatives from each LOB, and, for companies that have one or more electronic records, IT. Once your policy is defined and validated, it should be published and easily accessible by every company employee with a stake in information.

RSD customers typically begin building out the Information Governance program by defining a corporate standard Master Classification, then applying variances as necessary to the various jurisdictions. This includes:

• The hierarchy and structure of their Record Classes
• Retention schedules that define not just retention and disposition, but also privacy actions, storage lifecycle events, and the handling of metadata attached to records
• Who is involved in defining, validating, and maintaining these processes. Remember that Information Governance Steering committee I mentioned earlier? They’re like iPads. You're going to want one of those, if you don’t already have one*.

* - I don’t, so don’t take this as an informed endorsement.

In the past, companies have had to do this with multiple tools that were not designed specifically for this purpose. The focus of these solutions has historically been at the jurisdiction / business unit level. This is how we ended up with those messy taxonomies of redundant records. Since taxonomies and retention schedules were maintained at granular levels of the organization, local Records Managers defined the hierachies and structures they needed. There was significant overlap across jurisdictions. As these were centralized, many companies created taxonomies composed of thousands of Record Classes, many of which were redundant.

With RSD GLASS Mosaic, customers simplify their taxonomy into a single Master Classification, with centrally-defined variances that link to and account for laws and regulations applicable at each jurisdiction. Customers use Mosaic as the means for recruiting all constituencies in this process… legal, compliance, IT, Lines of Business, and Records Management at the various organizational levels.

Like a retailer who now has gained validation on a corporate standard for mapping out a store plan, including the various subtleties that may apply in different geographies and locales, Mosaic customers are ready for the next step, where they take the standard, and begin applying it…

Ah, but I get ahead of myself. This entry was all about "Define Centrally." They know all about that in Lebanon, Kansas. Geographic center of the contiguous 48 United States.

 

The New Guy's First Lesson in Information Governance

Greetings! While Tamir does an outstanding job keeping the RSD Blog fresh and interesting and relevant, the fact is he has quite a lot on his plate. This week, for example, he’s in Geneva, working with the marketing team there on some new deliverables, and sharing some of what we all learned last week at LegalTech. In addition, he is also preparing for next week’s webinar (you’re dialing in, right?). Busy times for Tamir, and, frankly a fascinating time for all of us at RSD.

By way of introduction, I am a Business Solutions Consultant for RSD, working out of our Chicago office. I’m a relatively new RSD employee. Previously, I spent 14 years in the Knowledge Management, SOA and Data Governance spaces. Mine is a hands-on pre-sales role, working with customers and potential customers to help build an Information Governance foundation. For this reason, much of what I will post here at the RSD Blog will be observations and experiences from real-world projects. It is easy, when discussing a topic as esoteric and overloaded as Information Governance, to think of it in very abstract terms. This is useful, but not sufficient in helping customers develop a strategy for managing their information. It’s my hope that I can generate discussion at a tangible level, passing along practical benefits and challenges my customers experience in their Information Governance maturation. I would very much like to hear from you as I do this. To get started, I will be posting a three-part series describing Information Governance in retail terms. I’ll introduce the idea today, and build it out over the next couple of weeks.

As you know, I am fairly new to RSD… naturally, this is not my first experience as The New Guy. No, that was my junior year in high school, when I was hired by the local Eckerd’s Drug store as a Pharmacy Technician. What a cool first job! While my friends were toiling away down the street at Del Taco and Baskin-Robbins, I got to take prescription slips, call for refill approvals, and even type some of the prescription information into that fancy new computin’ system. And at $3.85 an hour, I was making significantly more money than those aforementioned friends.

About 6 weeks into my employment, we had to stay late one night and give the store a thorough cleaning and restocking. It was explained to me that we were going to be visited the next day by "Ted Anderson"*, a Regional Vice President. Ted’s name was spoken in hushed tones, not unlike Voldemort’s in the Harry Potter books. He was the highest-ranking Eckerd’s executive we would ever see. What’s more, he had a reputation as a bit of a tyrant. My pharmacist told me that he would probably be gone by the time I came in for my shift the next day, but if not, all I should say to him was “Yes, Mr. Anderson.”

* - I have changed Mr. Anderson’s name just slightly because, for all I know, he Googles himself**, or perhaps even reads our blog, and might be a potential customer. I’d rather he NOT remember me for the story I am about to share.

** - Don't we all?

My pharmacist was wrong. Mr. Anderson was still in the store when I arrived the following afternoon. He was walking around the store, making pronouncements, assigning to-do lists. Three of my colleagues were following him, furiously scribbling notes. I stayed out of his way best I could, but he eventually made his way back to the pharmacy. And here I was, The New Guy, stocking shelves, laying low as instructed. I was hoping his time in my domain would be short. It wasn’t.

“Who do we have here?” I looked up from the crate I was unpacking, and it was Ted Anderson.

“Hi, sir. Jim Amsler, new pharmacy tech.” I had already said more than I was allowed. He looked at my name badge. We made polite conversation for a minute or so while my pharmacist watched nervously from behind her counter. Then came this:

“What do you think of the new layout?”

Apparently, shortly before I was hired, Eckerd's had rolled out a new store template. We were one of a half-dozen or so stores piloting the new design. And Ted Anderson was the chief architect behind the change. This was His Thing. Even though I didn’t know this at the time, I still should have punted the question, and made vague approving statements. Silly me. I didn’t.

“You know, I have actually been wondering about this. I don’t understand some parts of it. Like this End Cap here… it’s all Halloween Candy. It’s at the end of an aisle of dental products. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

My three colleagues all looked down at their shoelaces.

“Really, Mr. Amsler? What would you put here instead?”

Good question. I hadn’t thought about it. I made up something off the top of my head… I’m sure it was gibberish. It didn’t matter. There was no correct answer to this question. Ted Anderson patiently waited for me to finish whatever it was I was saying, maintaining unflinching eye contact. He then shredded me, preaching for 10 minutes on the fundamentals and process of store design. To this day, I remember his exact words when he was done: “Would you rather our customers walked into our store only to find a street bazaar?”

I remember this because I wasn't sure what a street bazaar was.

To be fair, this retail model has worked for thousands of years... Photo courtesy of Ed Yourdon via Flickr.

Not to get all The Wonder Years on you, but… I learned a lot that day. Among other things, I learned:

• Store Design is a science.
• The process starts at the top levels of a retail organization.
• Significant time and sums of money are spent on determining optimal store layout(s).
• Once a model is approved at corporate, it then gets deployed to local stores.
• This process is meticulously documented.
• Customers expect each store to look like every other. Exceptions must be perfectly obvious and understandable.
• Store Management can participate in this process through formal communication channels.
• New Pharmacy Techs should keep their mouths closed when talking to an RVP.

As to the Information Governance space, first think about...

Ah, but I get ahead of myself.

Gruppo BPER Realizes a 253% ROI in One Year Using RSD Solution

As I have stated before, paper will never go away however there are numerous ways for an organization to reduce the amount of pages printed. Thoughtware Worldwide conducted a detailed analysis on how Gruppo BPER was able to reduce over 150 million printed pages annually by delivering data electronically. In addition to saving ~2000 trees, Gruppo BPER was able to streamline operations and dramatically improve decision making. As opposed to waiting for days to get information, users can now search, analyze, and customize the information.

Gruppo BPER improved customer interactions by reducing processing inefficiencies, better staff utilization, and putting knowledge at everyone’s finger tips for better decisions. The case study represents how data hidden in operational systems can be transformed into actionable intelligence and reduce print.

Read the case study, but please think twice before you print it.

Push, Pull, quels services pour l'information ?

Mise en exergue à la fin des années 90, la distinction "Push/Pull" ne fait plus recette aujourd'hui dans les débats.

Avec le web 2.0 et l'apparition des réseaux sociaux, les responsables marketing tentent de marier les deux avec opportunisme, tandis que les consommateurs et utilisateurs que nous sommes se satisfont d'une approche orientée "pull" ressentie comme plus respectueuse et moins agressive.

Côté entreprise, il semble que l'orientation soit bien différente et que le "push" soit toujours synonyme d'efficacité.

La valorisation de l'information par une distribution sélective

Le travail quotidien dans l'entreprise est bien plus exigeant en terme de disponibilité des informations que la participation à des réseaux sociaux ou plus simplement la consultation de portail web.

Pour répondre aux besoins de rapidité des utilisateurs, les outils "push" font merveille dans la distribution des informations et des documents.

La distribution permet de valoriser une information au service de l'activité de l'utilisateur. Il peut s'agir d'une alerte liée à une métadonnée ou d'un document résumant une transaction ou encore un rapport financier statuant sur une situation à un instant t.
Cette information ou ce contenu est délivré dans le format adapté au besoin de l'utilisateur (courrier électronique, pièce jointe, feuille de calcul, flux CSV ou XML, etc.).
La distribution en push facilite l'interopérabilité des applications par la rapidité à laquelle les informations sont communiquées mais également par sa facilité d'intégration dans une architecture opérationnelle.

Les outils ou fonctionnalités push permettent à la fois un contrôle et une finesse dans la diffusion de l'information pour optimiser les solutions de gestion de contenus et de gouvernance de l'information.

La valorisation de l'information par une exposition pertinente

Ces qualités font que le mode "push" est souvent ressenti comme très efficace mais peu adapté à certains de types de contenus et/ou de public.

Le mode "pull" largement représenté par les sites tant professionnels (mise à disposition de factures, de relevés, etc.) que sociaux (exposition de photos, d'informations, d'avis, etc.) convient bien pour une approche marketing.
Il véhicule et valorise une image de transparence et d'ouverture de l'entreprise.

L'exposition permet à chacun de trouver et de sélectionner, à sa convenance, l'information dont il a besoin. Les fonctionnalités "pull" sont idéales pour valoriser un patrimoine informationnel au service d'une relation client.

Si avec le "push" l'entreprise étendue et l'économie du savoir deviennent une réalité avec le "pull" c'est l'entreprise "citoyenne" (au sens acteur de la vie sociale et économique) du monde qui s'affiche.

"Push-Pull" ou "Push" versus "Pull" ?

Il est probable que les deux ont leur place. Il convient d'être pragmatique et d'utiliser la meilleure technique selon la cible, le contenu et surtout son objectif.

La gouvernance de l'information ne pousse pas à privilégier l'une ou l'autre de ces méthodes pour autant que les actifs informationnels soient utilisés au mieux des intérêts de son propriétaire.
C'est pour cette raison qu'il serait contre productif d'abandonner la distribution en faveur d'une exposition systématique.

Chacun comprend l'intérêt de déposer en "mains propres" de chaque récipiendaire concerné l'information sensible plutôt que de l'afficher dans un espace (même protégé).

8ème Conférence européenne sur l'archivage digital - Genève 28-30|04|2010

Le centre de conférence international de Genève abritait du 28 au 30 avril, la 8ème conférence européenne sur l'archivage digital.

Un nombre impressionnant de participants ont fait honneur aux speakers et il était bien difficile de faire son programme sans avoir l'impression de manquer une présentation ou un atelier important.

Avant de parler des thèmes, nous voudrions partager avec vous notre satisfaction quant à l'organisation de l'évènement et notre coup de coeur pour le travail de signalétique fait par des étudiants de la Haute école des arts de Berne (Hochschule der Künste - Bern) sous la houlette de Jimmy Schmid.  Bravo pour leur créativité et leur sens pratique !

Les thèmes

Les présentations étaient organisées autour de 4 thèmes :

• Profil professionnel : nouvelles compétences à l'ère numérique
• Constitution des fonds : comment documenter la société de l'information
• e-Archivage : réorganisation des processus et des modèles d'entreprise
• accès en ligne : solutions et implications.

e-Archivage

A défaut de pouvoir suivre toutes les présentations, nous avons privilégié l'e-Archivage et la réorganisation des processus et des modèles d'entreprises. La plupart des contributions étaient très intéressantes et nous avons retenu celle de Monsieur Alexander Samarin à propos de la synergie entre BPM (Business Process Model) et archivage électronique [www.improving-bpm-systems.com].
Nous avons également suivi avec intérêt les retours d'expérience du CNES, des Archives nationales de France (le rôle structurant des référentiels), de la Poste française ou encore de de l'AFSSAPS (Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Produits de Santé) et le projet d'archivage électronique des autorisations de mise sur le marché des médicaments.

L'importance des standards

Les normes et les standards sont au cœur des réflexions, des projets et des expériences. Nombreux sont les pays ou les organisations qui ont choisi le PDF/A comme standard d'archivage pour les documents et plus globalement le contenu non structuré.
Moreq2 et l'annonce de Moreq2010 couplé à un appel à contribution fait partie de ces normes et l'approche plus "verticalisée" de la présentation des exigences de Moreq2 ne peut qu'en faciliter la mise en oeuvre.

Aujourd'hui, la définition des référentiels se fait au regard du respect des standards tels PRONOM [formats de fichiers], IANA [types MIME], ICA, ISO 639, OAIS, Moreq2 et des l'exigence d'interopérabilité.

Enfin, nous retiendrons également le projet d'émulation DIOSCURI présenté par Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands en alternative à la migration par ainsi que SIARD, la solution  d'archivage de bases de données relationnelles développée et mise à disposition gratuitement par les ingénieurs des Archives fédérales suisses.

Il ne nous est malheureusement pas possible de rendre compte de toutes les présentations, aussi merci d'utiliser les commentaires pour partager vos impressions et réactions au contenu de cette note ou à celui des séances auxquelles vous avez pu participer.

Cordialement,

Claude SUPER