Taking “AIIM” at Risk, Governance and Compliance: it’s as easy as 1-2-3
At the 2008 AIIM/On Demand Conference in Boston last week, I presented on risk, governance and compliance as it relates to records management. Barry Murphy from Forrester Research and I led a presentation session before a group of about 70. The audience was a sharp group of folks that certainly had some good questions for us.
Our presentation followed what we had heard from milling in the aisles at the Boston Convention Center; that managers need to be informed of the first steps in an overall risk reduction strategy through records management, and made aware of what they can do to get started.
Let me offer a few tips pulled from the presentation.
The first step is to create the right team. This team should encompass key stakeholders from the legal, IT and business communities; they must coalesce to become the retention management team. They have five core responsibilities that draw on their collective background:
• Understand how businesspeople consume information.
• Distill retention decisions for legal.
• Turn business needs and legal decisions into IT requirements.
• Conduct quality assurance of information classification.
• Lead the change management effort.
With a solid team in place, you must then simplify and automate policies. Don’t expect your enterprise users to learn complex classification policies; let the technology do it for you. There are a number of software tools that can shoulder the burden of sorting out complex systems, so let the technology do the work to reduce the risk of error.
Finally, allow your e-Discovery and retention management policies to drive longer-term information management strategies. Use the architecture your team puts in place to manage your records and inform future choices about how your information is managed. But most importantly, get out of reactive mode! Decide today that you will take command of your records and institute policies that will protect you and your organization.
Rich Baily
Vice President, Business Process Services
Xerox Global Services