Click here for our Financial Systems Division

The role of technology in managing records retention and disposal by Jaume Vilar of BEP Systems (part 1)

This paper is an extract from ‘Managing Records Retention and Disposal’ by Alison North and published by Ark July 2009

Introduction

The management of records retention and disposal cannot be discussed without reference to information technology. IT permeates the modern business world and is the source of the bulk of documents and records. As well as being the source of documents, IT also provides the tools to manage documents efficiently throughout their lifecycle.

This paper is concerned with the technology which originates documents, the technology which manages the retention of documents, and how these two interact both with each other and with documents that do not exist in the electronic domain.

As many records managers will testify, the ‘Holy Grail’ of records management is a series of interconnected systems that seamlessly identify a document, its content and its classification, link this with the retention period and then provide triggers for users to interact with the archiving and disposal process only at necessary points. Whilst this might be unrealistic across the whole of an organisation, advances in the tools used to create and manage documents in recent years mean that it is finally possible to begin (in some circumstances) to automate the archiving and disposal processes.

The approaches described below provide a ‘menu’ of options. It would be incorrect for an organisation to assume that only one is right for it. Inevitably in an organisation there are activities that are bespoke and others which are highly process driven. The correct method is to perform a cost-risk-benefit analysis for each area of the organisation prior to deciding which approach (or mixture) is best for that part of the organisation.

IT systems

Records retention theoretically touches on any IT system which holds data relating to the organisation. In addition there are IT systems that support the actual process of records retention. The different types of systems likely to be encountered are described below. When we come to describe how IT can be used to implement the different approaches, we will then see how these systems can be interconnected.

Document storage systems
Electronic document management (EDM) systems
These are usually enterprise-class systems designed to provide central repositories for large volumes of data and manage the security of the archive. The aim of an appropriate records retention policy will be to ensure that its contents are appropriately retained.

Warehousing systems
These systems (either in-house or outside the organisation) manage the storage of physical documents or items.

Collaboration tools
These are becoming more common as workforces become more dispersed. They allow teams, departments or projects to work together wherever they are. For the purposes of records retention, they provide two very useful capabilities. First, by providing a single workspace, they prevent duplication. Second, they allow documents to have sophisticated metadata, thereby allowing documents to be tagged. SharePoint is an example of a collaboration tool.

Transaction or business operational systems
These are the systems which are used in the day-to-day operation of the organisation. In general they will contain the ‘records’ of different business activities that have taken place and are the natural repositories for this information. An objective of records retention management is to control how the disposal trigger is sent to these systems.

Records retention management systems
Reference tools
These provide the base retention policy data and as such form the hub of any part of the retention approach which is technically implemented. Among the information they can store are: document types, classification collating the document types by business process or functional areas, policy reference material, legislation and regulation supporting the policy.

Records retention management systems
These co-ordinate the records management process by combining the data supplied by the reference tools and the individual document data (see ‘Document storage systems’ above), to provide scheduling and workflow to ensure disposal happens at the correct time.

There are two main aspects to these systems:

  1. First, a document/record metadata store including document type and the ‘trigger date’ which drives the retention period. This metadata may be supplied by the document storage system, determined by the records management system (see ‘Auto-classification’ below) or input directly into the records retention management system by users if the document storage system either does not exist or is inappropriate.
  2. Second, an automation engine (sometimes called a ‘rules engine’) which monitors the documents/records and drives the workflow and disposal processes based upon data supplied in the reference tools and other sources.

Records retention management systems may be one and the same as the workflow/business automation systems listed below. However, they will usually be more specialist tools which can be implemented at a lower cost than full-blown business automation systems.

Workflow/business automation systems
Examples of these systems are SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft. These provide organisation­ wide capability for finance, HR and so on, as well as authorisations of different kinds. Records retention policy implementation can utilise the capability of these systems to provide the workflow and authorisation requirements of the disposal (and possibly even classification) processes, depending on the user interface required.

Whether or not these are appropriate for the records retention policy will be closely tied to the existing business and systems architecture in an organisation. If not, then records management systems (or manual processes) will provide this capability.

/more…