Records Governance, Part 1: Preserve the Value of Your Information

Records governance isn’t a nice to have, it’s critical to ensure the integrity and accuracy of your records. If your company is ever involved in legal action, your records will provide key evidence. Those records have to be authentic and reliable.

“The international standard for records management (ISO 15489) states that authoritative records should have authenticity, reliability, integrity, and useability [sic].” --The Probative Value of Archive Documents, by Trudy Huscamp Peterson

Organizations today face many challenges to preserve their information asset. Different business systems are used to create and manage content and data without any governance of their integrities or their retention periods. Any content/data deemed important to maintain for compliance

reasons should be followed by a records management system. For example, ENGIE, one of the biggest company in the world in the business of gas, power and energy services, uses the everteam records management solution for driving their governance policies

Moreover, this records management solution provides capabilities to not only store records, but guarantee they can be accessed by the appropriate people and exported and readable at any point in the future.

Whether you store records to comply with industry regulations or based on your own company policies, there are three things ensuring that you can trust genuinely on your information capital.

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How To Ensure Records IntegrityYour organization creates and manages a great deal of information both

content and data. When this information is deemed to be important and

stored as records they are stored in a records management solution where

no one can modify them.

Integrity means that you follow your records to insure at any time in their

lifecycle that your records are exactly the same as when they were first

imported into the records management solution.

To ensure integrity, you must deploy dedicated features that confirm the

integrity of every file.

Business systems come and go. So how do you know content or data created in a

business system that is retired will be readable in the future?

Reversibility is the process to making sure your files and datas can be read and

accessible in the future. For example, the file format you choose to store your content

is important and depends on the type of file, but there are a couple of general rules

you should follow:

1. Text-based Content: According to ISO19005, PDFa is the common standard for

storing text-based files. PDFa is a specialized version of Adobe PDF that is used

for long-term storage of page-based documents. This standard maximizes device

independence, ensures the document is completely self-contained and self-

documented with the appropriate standards-based metadata.

2. Data: Data is typically stored in some type of database, either relational or NoSQL.

In a relational database, data is stored in tables, rows and columns. In a NoSQL

database, data is stored as documents typically in XML format. To ensure the

reversibility of the data stream, they should be exported to XML or CSV (comma

separated values) and stored in the records management application.

Also, when you place a file or data in an a records management application, the ability

to retrieve all that content at any point in the future is necessary. Many organization

find this difficult to do.

Your Records Management application requires an export function that can easily

retrieve the record in human readable format.

Reversibility: Is the Record

Readable?

Records Governance, Part 1: Preserve the Value of Your Information 2

Records Governance, Part 1: Preserve the Value of Your Information 3

Audit: What is the Record Lifecycle?

Storing a record isn’t enough to ensure its integrity and reliability. It’s also very important to

track all the actions on the document. By tracking how a document is accessed and used, you

can ensure that no one does anything do the record they don’t have permission to do.

A Records Management application must support the creation and maintenance of an audit

trail, typically stored and signed to insure his reliability. This audit trail is accessible from a

record directly.

You need to create an audit trail for the lifecycle of the record. Some things you must audit

include:

• Who did an action on the record ?

• When this action happened ?

• What was this action ?

A Final NoteThe integrity of records is critical. Ensuring reversibility and

auditability are all important ways to ensure your records are

authentic and reliable and have demonstratable genuine value.

There are many other ways to take in account to preserve the Value

of Your Information, but these are the key ways.

Next time we’ll look at how you can provide one solution to manage

all archiving needs.

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About Everteam

Everteam brings over 25 years’ experience and innovation to the field of Enterprise Content

Management. In an ever-increasing legal and compliance environment, Everteam’s range

of products support the improvement of content –driven processes, and enable enterprise

customers to easily monitor and align their content strategies for overall organizational

efficiency and effectiveness.

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