Records Governance, Part 2: Can One Solution Manage All Your Archiving Needs?

Records Governance, Part 2: Can One Solution Manage All Your Archiving Needs?

How many records archives do you have in your organization? It’s likely you store records in a number of different systems. What about your paper records? Stored in another location separately from your digital records. Having all your records managed in different archives makes it very challenging to ensure records governance. The good news is you can manage all your archiving needs, paper and digital, with one system.

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Managing Paper ArchivesThere are two types of records organizations manage: physical (paper)

records and digital (electronic) records. Paper records are typically managed

separately from digital records, sometimes stored in file rooms within an

organization, often stored off-site in specialized archives by commercial

records archive companies, such as Iron Mountain. In some cases, an

organization might use more than one paper archive vendor to store its

records.

Just like digital archives, your organization must ensure paper records are

stored securely and safely, and can be easily retrieved when requested.

Paper archives also have the same lifecycle process as digital records, which

can include long-term archive or disposal via destruction.

Proper classification and tagging are required to manage paper archives

properly. Unfortunately, this is not always done, or done in an inconsistent

way, making the management of paper archives challenging.

Many organizations today have a vast growing volume of digital records to manage.

These digital archives are usually managed separately from paper archives. Digital

archives are stored within the systems that created them or in a standalone records

archive repository, or some combination of the two approaches.

Because digital records often remain within the systems that created them,

organizations find themselves manually searching archives to find the records they

need and manually applying governance to each managed system. This manual

process takes time and is prone to errors because it’s not consistent.

You can simplify this complicated records management process through the use of a

centralized records management solution that doesn’t necessarily centralize all the

digital records in one physical location, but instead, tracks and manages governance

through a single system. A centralized approach to records governance is critical

considering the volume of digital records to manage.

Managing Digital Archives

Records Governance, Part 2: Can One Solution Manage All Your Archiving Needs? 2


A Centralized Approach to Manage All Records

Some organizations might find it works fine to have separate records archive solutions for

paper and digital records, but with the growing volume of records to store and manage, these

organizations are few.

The best approach to managing all your records - paper and digital - is using a centralized

solution. These solutions do exist.

Centralized records archives solutions don’t care where a record is stored, they simply enable

you to track all the records you have and manage them holistically, wherever they are located.

The benefits of a single records archive solution are many. Probably one of the most important is the

ability to search in a single location for the records you need and have a result set returned that crosses

all records archives.

Consider wanting to find all the records you have on a customer who has been with your company for

many years. Some of these records might be paper-based, stored in an off-site records archive facility.

Other records are spread across several different systems within the organization.

Without a centralized records archive solution, a records manager would have to manually go to each

system and search for the records they need. Then they would have to contact the off-site archive

facility and put in a request for any paper archives related to the customer.

Now consider this. Every system that stores records is classifying the records a little differently. The

classification schemes and metadata are applied ad hoc or based on how the initial system was set up.

The classification scheme for paper records is also different. It could take days or weeks, even months

to find the records you need.

With a centralized records archive solution, a consistent classification and metadata scheme is applied

to all records, regardless of location. Searching becomes much easier, and you can be confident you

are getting all the records you need. In this system, if the records are electronic, they are simply a click

away.

If they are paper, you click a button and have a request send to the paper archive provider to retrieve

the records and send them to you.The paper records are automatically sent, and you have a record of

who requested them and where there were sent. Even if the paper archives are located with different

providers, a separate request is sent to each to retrieve the required records.

For the records manager, it doesn’t matter where the records are located; they simply have a single

location to search and get back a complete result set they need.

A Single Search and Retrieve Function

A Final NoteThe volume of records your organization stores is likely enormous

and growing bigger every day. This growth is making it harder to

manage records, especially through separate manual processes.

Whether you have separate archives for digital records or paper

archives, there is an easier way to ensure your governance policies

are applied and managed - through a central archive solution.

A centralized records archive gives you a single location to track,

classify, search and manage governance policies for all your

records, improving your ability to retrieve information quickly and

ensure company and industry compliance regulations are applied

consistently across the company.


For a centralized archive solution to be successful, a consistent, cohesive content strategy is critical. A

centralized classification and metadata scheme is very important to ensure that records, digital and

paper, have the proper tags and metadata applied.

Searching and retrieving records without a central content strategy approach can’t ensure you will find

the right records. Imagine trying to search all your records for a customer that relate to a particular

transaction. If the transaction ID is recorded differently in each records system and there is no

centralized method that matches up the different ID types, then you will not find the records you need.

Much of the classification process can be automated, especially during record creation and use of the

record during its lifetime, but manually tagging is also often necessary to ensure the completeness.

A Consistent Con-tent Strategy is Key

Another key benefit to a centralized records archive is the ability to define and apply governance

policies to the entire archive from a single location.

Governance policies include how long to store a record, who has the rights to search for the record,

who can view it, request it and so on. Governance policies apply to the entire lifecycle of a record from

the time it is created to its eventual disposition (whether that’s destruction or long-term archival).

Also, with a centralized archive, you have one place to update governance policies and ensure they are

applied consistently across all records, regardless of location.

A Centralized Gover-nance Process

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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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Records Governance, Part 2: Can One Solution Manage All Your Archiving Needs?