A plethera of Straight-Forward Records Management Information

Posted on Aug 14, 2009 in Records Management News

http://www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/arb/records_management/rqsummer2009.html

Records Quar­terly Vol. 2 No. 2 Sum­mer 2009

View as PDF <http://www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/arb/records_management/documents/RQSummer2009.pdf>

Records Quar­terly Sum­mer 2009

Con­tents

*     Records Clean-Up Days: Get­ting your records stor­age under con­trol <http://www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/arb/records_management/rqsummer2009.html#clean>

*     Records Man­age­ment Basics: Inac­tive Records Man­age­ment <http://www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/arb/records_management/rqsummer2009.html#inactive>

*     Infor­ma­tion Secu­rity Update <http://www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/arb/records_management/rqsummer2009.html#isec>

Best Per­sonal Regards,

Cary

How long is long-term storage?

Posted on Aug 14, 2009 in Records Management News

How long is long-term stor­age? by John Web­ster http://www.cnet.com/profile/JohnSWebster/

There is a big dis­con­nect between how long peo­ple think they should be stor­ing data and how long they actual can. One group of ven­dors and aca­d­e­mics is try­ing to change that.

Two years ago, the Stor­age Net­work­ing Indus­try Association’s Data Man­age­ment Forum reported the results of a land­mark study http://www.snia.org/about/news/newsroom/pr/view?item_key=62ecc0b3acfe103c71 88e78d16404201078b6322> that looked at the state of long-term stor­age, i.e. pre­serv­ing a dig­i­tal object for more than 10 years. Some dis­turb­ing results jumped out.

The study sug­gested that we live in a dig­i­tal ver­sion of the Dark Ages. I’m talk­ing about it now because I think the mes­sages from the study are still very rel­e­vant to both IT admin­is­tra­tors and consumers.

Read more of the arti­cle here . http://news.cnet.com/8301-21546_3-10309283–10253464.html

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Best Per­sonal Regards,

Cary

The History of Records Management in the USA from an Old Pierce Leahy document

Posted on Aug 12, 2009 in Records Management News

The Begin­nings of Records Man­age­ment: 1930–50

Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt helped cre­ate the need for the records man­age­ment indus­try by dra­mat­i­cally increas­ing the size of the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, first with his New Deal pro­grams and then with the defense bureau­cracy related to World War II. Roo­sevelt rec­og­nized the prob­lems he was cre­at­ing and wanted to use the Pen­ta­gon, which he hated archi­tec­turally, to store records after the war. But Roosevelt’s inter­est was pri­mar­ily archival; in 1934 he signed the leg­is­la­tion estab­lish­ing the U.S. National Archives.

It was a con­tem­po­rary of Roosevelt’s, Emmett J. (Ed) Leahy, who first began think­ing about the eco­nomic con­se­quences of all these gov­ern­ment records and inves­ti­gat­ing ways to man­age the whole records process. Leahy started test­ing his ideas, first while work­ing at the U.S. Archives, and then as direc­tor of records coor­di­na­tion for the Navy Depart­ment dur­ing the war. Look­ing for ways to make records work more cost-efficiently, Leahy intro­duced the con­cept of high-density stor­age in records cen­ters, thus reduc­ing the amount of floor space needed for inac­tive records. Other ini­tia­tives included man­age­ment of active files, guide and form para­graphs and let­ters (called cor­re­spon­dence man­age­ment), and micro­film­ing impor­tant and volu­mi­nous records as well as those needed for secu­rity rea­sons. Dur­ing his four years at the Depart­ment of the Navy, Leahy’s inno­va­tions saved the Navy $21 mil­lion and earned him the Navy Com­men­da­tion Ribbon.

After the war, Leahy con­tin­ued to work in the field as a con­sul­tant with a pri­vate com­pany, devel­op­ing the con­cept of a life cycle for records and pro­duc­ing sta­tis­tics on the costs of record­keep­ing. While assist­ing the first Com­mis­sion on the Orga­ni­za­tion of the Exec­u­tive Branch of Gov­ern­ment from 1947 through 1949, Leahy pushed for the sep­a­ra­tion of records man­age­ment, which he viewed as con­cerned with eco­nom­ics, effec­tive­ness, and effi­ciency, from his­tor­i­cal archiv­ing. His efforts in this area resulted in the estab­lish­ment of a new agency, the Fed­eral Records Admin­is­tra­tion as part of the Gen­eral Ser­vices Admin­is­tra­tion, not the National Archives.

In 1948, Leahy formed his own busi­ness, Leahy & Co., to advise local gov­ern­ments, includ­ing New York City, how to keep their records from bal­loon­ing. The fol­low­ing year, when he showed East­ern Air­lines Pres­i­dent Eddie Rick­en­backer how that com­pany was wast­ing money on inef­fi­cient record­keep­ing, East­ern become Leahy’s first cor­po­rate client. Other com­pa­nies fol­lowed, and Leahy’s client list soon included du Pont, Beth­le­hem Steel, and the Alu­minum Com­pany of Amer­ica (Alcoa). From Con­sult­ing to Stor­age: 1951–70

In 1951, with his con­sult­ing busi­ness report­ing prof­its of $100,000, Leahy started Leahy Busi­ness Archives, a records stor­age busi­ness. This was the first com­pany in the indus­try offer­ing pri­vate com­pa­nies a means to store their inac­tive records. Leahy con­sid­ered records stor­age an eco­nomic issue, and he estab­lished his new com­pany in New York City, where space was at a pre­mium. Leahy served as pres­i­dent of his two com­pa­nies and con­tin­ued to pro­mote records man­age­ment until his death in 1964 at age 54.

The cost of space was not the only con­sid­er­a­tion dri­ving com­pa­nies to store their records dur­ing the early years of the Cold War. Iron Moun­tain Atomic Stor­age used the pos­si­bil­ity of a nuclear con­flict in the mar­ket­ing of its bomb-proof stor­age facil­i­ties, located in an aban­doned iron mine near Hud­son, New York. West­ern States Under­ground Stor­age Vaults offered stor­age space in an old South­ern Pacific rail­road tun­nel south of San Fran­cisco and had a pic­ture of a mushroom-shaped cloud over the city on its first brochure.

As new records stor­age com­pa­nies were open­ing, Leo W. Pierce, Sr., founded L.W. Pierce Co., Inc. in 1957, to sup­ply fil­ing sys­tems and related equip­ment to busi­nesses in and around Philadel­phia. In 1969, he estab­lished a sub­sidiary, Pierce Busi­ness Archives, when Scott Paper Co. asked him to help sort out and orga­nize “the mess in the base­ment,” accord­ing to a 1984 arti­cle in Dun’s Busi­ness Month. Once the records had been orga­nized, Scott Paper asked Pierce to store them. The com­pany began as a $9,000 oper­a­tion in, log­i­cally, the base­ment of Pierce’s home.

Over the next two decades, Pierce’s busi­nesses expanded pri­mar­ily through inter­nal growth. Dur­ing this period, Leahy Busi­ness Archives was bought by the Bri­tan­nia Secu­rity Group plc of Lon­don and served as its U.S. data man­age­ment division.

Expan­sion of Off-Site Record­keep­ing: 1970s-80s

Through the early 1970s, com­pa­nies (and their legal depart­ments), con­sid­ered records man­age­ment sim­ply a way to keep impor­tant papers orga­nized. But as gov­ern­ment agen­cies, both fed­eral and state, wrote more reg­u­la­tions, as employee ben­e­fits expanded, and as the fear of lit­i­ga­tion grew, com­pa­nies found it was not enough to store records for their own pro­tec­tion. Now a com­pany needed to store its records to pro­tect the com­pany itself against law­suits and to com­ply with gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions. The demand for stor­age increased dra­mat­i­cally. In 1982, Pierce had rev­enues of over $4 mil­lion. Leahy Busi­ness Archives and Pierce Busi­ness Archives were among a hand­ful of large com­pa­nies in the records stor­age busi­ness; most were small, local oper­a­tions. By 1984, Leahy had 11 facil­i­ties in the North­east, Texas, and Illi­nois, and was stor­ing four bil­lion pieces of paper for 1,200 clients. Stor­age costs ranged from $2 to $4 per cubic foot a year. Pierce had 1,100 clients for whom they stored 4.2 bil­lion pieces of paper in ten facil­i­ties through­out Penn­syl­va­nia, New York, New Jer­sey, and Con­necti­cut. Clients paid $2.28 to $2.40 per cubic foot annu­ally. Both com­pa­nies offered same-day retrieval to stored records, which were now keyed by computer.

“Each doc­u­ment is indexed and its descrip­tion and loca­tion stored in a Sperry Uni­vac 90/30 main­frame com­puter. With the com­puter index­ing and records stor­age, a doc­u­ment can be located in five min­utes or less,” Leo Pierce explained to Mod­ern Office Tech­nol­ogy in 1985. Com­pa­nies made some 1,500 requests for stored doc­u­ments each day, and if received before 3:30 p.m., Pierce would deliver it the morn­ing of the next busi­ness day. Emer­gency requests were filled in three hours or less. In mar­ket­ing their ser­vices, both Pierce and Leahy focused on the cost sav­ings of a stor­age com­pany over in-house, off-site stor­age man­aged by the client. With com­pa­nies increas­ingly need­ing to cut costs, this approach helped con­vince clients to con­tract out their records stor­age activ­i­ties. “Micro­film is a won­der­ful prod­uct, espe­cially when used to store active records,” Pierce said in the Mod­ern Office Tech­nol­ogy arti­cle. How­ever, he esti­mated that for what a com­pany paid to micro­film the con­tents of a four-drawer file cab­i­net they could store the same amount of paper for 30 years. Thus, since most records were kept for only five years, the com­pany was wast­ing money microfilming.

One other fac­tor also con­tributed to the increased demand for records stor­age: the com­puter. Although early in the 1980s, mag­a­zine arti­cles were pre­dict­ing that com­put­ers would her­ald the “paper­less office,” desk­top pub­lish­ing and other soft­ware pro­grams actu­ally made it eas­ier for com­pa­nies to gen­er­ate even more paper.

In 1988, Bri­tan­nia Secu­rity acquired Instar, Inc. a records stor­age com­pany based in Mass­a­chu­setts, and merged it with Leahy Busi­ness Archives. The new sub­sidiary was named Leahy-Instar Inc.

Grow­ing the Com­pany: 1989–96

By the end of the 1980s, Leo Pierce had started plan­ning for his retire­ment. L.W. Pierce & Co. and the archives stor­age sub­sidiary were in good finan­cial shape, and Pierce had des­ig­nated his son Peter, one of eight chil­dren, as his suc­ces­sor, nam­ing him pres­i­dent of the com­pany in 1984. But Leo Pierce saw changes com­ing in the busi­ness as lia­bil­ity insur­ance costs soared and cus­tomers began demand­ing more ser­vices. It was evi­dent to him that small oper­a­tions would have a hard time mak­ing it in the com­ing years and that the records stor­age busi­ness was ripe for con­sol­i­da­tion. Pierce Archives had become one of the industry’s larger firms by con­cen­trat­ing on adding new cus­tomers and increas­ing the stor­age capac­ity of exist­ing clients. Leo and Peter Pierce agreed that the time had come to add acqui­si­tions to their growth strat­egy. In 1989, Bri­tan­nia Secu­rity decided to con­cen­trate on its secu­rity oper­a­tions, to get out of the data man­age­ment busi­ness, and to put Leahy Busi­ness Archives on the mar­ket. The fol­low­ing year, Bri­tan­nia sold Leahy Busi­ness Archives to Pierce for nearly $39 mil­lion, most of which was in cash. The acqui­si­tion dou­bled the size of Pierce, which was rein­cor­po­rated as Pierce Leahy Cor­po­ra­tion. The com­pany now had branches in Con­necti­cut, New Jer­sey, Mary­land, Mass­a­chu­setts, Rhode Island, Florida, Texas, Cal­i­for­nia, and Illinois.

Pierce Leahy waited two years before mak­ing another acqui­si­tion, and then, in April 1992, the com­pany bought Muh­len­haupt Records Man­age­ment and pro­ceeded to go on a spend­ing spree. Between 1992 and the end of 1996, Pierce Leahy bought and inte­grated 25 more com­pa­nies, adding some 12.4 mil­lion cubic feet of records. Among the pur­chases, in 1995, was Com­mand Records Ser­vices, Ltd., Canada’s lead­ing records man­age­ment com­pany, for approx­i­mately $25 mil­lion. The new acqui­si­tion became Pierce Leahy Com­mand. In Jan­u­ary 1995, Leo Pierce retired as chief exec­u­tive offi­cer, although he remained chair­man of the board. Peter Pierce assumed the CEO responsibilities.

The acqui­si­tions placed a great deal of debt on the com­pany, begin­ning with $30 to $40 mil­lion in financ­ing for the Leahy Busi­ness Archives pur­chase. In 1996, Pierce Leahy issued $200 mil­lion in notes and arranged for $110 mil­lion in bank credit. That year, Pierce Leahy had rev­enues over $100 mil­lion for the first time and a net loss of $1 million.

From Stor­age to Records Man­age­ment: The 1990s

The company’s name change in 1990 to Pierce Leahy Cor­po­ra­tion reflected more than the com­bin­ing of two busi­nesses. By elim­i­nat­ing the ref­er­ence to busi­ness archives, the change acknowl­edged the desire by the indus­try, at least for the larger com­pa­nies, to be per­ceived as offer­ing more than just stor­age facil­i­ties for cor­po­rate records.

In 1991, the com­pany began a two and one-half year, $8 mil­lion devel­op­ment project, and two years later intro­duced its core man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tem, Pierce Leahy User Solu­tion (PLUS). The PLUS com­puter sys­tem offered the only cen­tral­ized sys­tem for records man­age­ment in North Amer­ica. Using PLUS, the com­pany was able to locate, on a real-time basis, each unit of a customer’s records, no mat­ter where they were stored. Cus­tomers could also use a com­mon, cen­tral­ized data­base to access their records and infor­ma­tion about those records, on-line. The com­pany found PLUS reduced costs through cen­tral­iza­tion, improved cus­tomer ser­vice lev­els, and made it eas­ier and less expen­sive to inte­grate the com­pa­nies it acquired.

Dur­ing the decade, the term “records man­age­ment” became more preva­lent in mag­a­zine arti­cles and mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als, and “doc­u­ment reten­tion,” one step in the process of records man­age­ment, replaced “records stor­age.” The entire process, orig­i­nally described by Ed Leahy, included six steps: cre­ation, index­ing, fil­ing, retrieval, reten­tion, and destruc­tion. To help clients, the com­pany offered a series of ser­vices. As com­pany Pres­i­dent Peter Pierce explained it, “We begin at the begin­ning, look­ing at how and why doc­u­ments, records and files are cre­ated. We exam­ine the pro­ce­dures and sys­tems in an effort to stream­line, and where appro­pri­ate, elim­i­nate record­keep­ing bur­dens for our clients.” Fol­low­ing that, the com­pany might install an active records man­age­ment sys­tem to mon­i­tor every step in the life of the doc­u­ment and track paper, micro­film, micro­fiche, and any other type of stor­age media. Or, through its facil­ity man­age­ment divi­sion, Pierce Leahy might oper­ate a customer’s file room or stor­age facil­ity. It also offered imag­ing and micro­graphic ser­vices and would even sell a cus­tomer stor­age con­tain­ers. Still, the man­age­ment of inac­tive records remained the largest seg­ment of the company’s business.

In 1996, to help pay down some of the debt from its pur­chases, the com­pany issued $200 mil­lion in pub­lic notes with­out offer­ing stock to the pub­lic. Rev­enues for the year passed the $100 mil­lion level, reach­ing $129.7 mil­lion, but the com­pany had a net loss of over $1 million.

The Race for Num­ber One: 1997 and Beyond

Pierce Leahy con­tin­ued its three-prong growth strat­egy: new sales; increased use by cur­rent cus­tomers by sell­ing addi­tional ser­vices; and acqui­si­tions. Com­pa­nies con­tin­ued to cut costs by out­sourc­ing func­tions, includ­ing records man­age­ment, and Pierce Leahy went after that busi­ness. The com­pany esti­mated that, in 1997, only 25 per­cent of the records man­age­ment mar­ket had been out­sourced. Pierce Leahy’s pri­mary growth tar­get, how­ever, remained acqui­si­tions. In the first six months of 1997, the com­pany bought eight more records man­age­ment com­pa­nies, adding some 7.2 mil­lion cubic feet of records. With the com­pany owing more than $250 mil­lion in long-term debt, the fam­ily took Pierce Leahy pub­lic in July, offer­ing $110 mil­lion in stock (about one-third of the com­pany) and $120 mil­lion in notes. Of the pro­ceeds from the stock offer­ing, $70 mil­lion went to pay off the notes issued in 1996. The rest went to the fam­ily for its shares. The money from the new notes was used to pay off the company’s big bank debt.

The year saw records under stor­age increase by 45 per­cent to 58.8 mil­lion cubic feet, with 5.2 mil­lion from new cus­tomers, 2.9 mil­lion added by exist­ing cus­tomers, and 10.3 mil­lion from 17 acqui­si­tions. Rev­enues for the year reached $183.5 mil­lion, with a net loss of $15.1 million.

Acqui­si­tions, includ­ing that of a Cana­dian com­peti­tor, con­tin­ued in 1998. As it approached the 21st cen­tury, Pierce Leahy had a diverse client base, annual and mul­ti­year con­tracts, and a cus­tomer reten­tion rate of 98 per­cent. Its rep­u­ta­tion and low-cost ser­vice made it a strong can­di­date to attract a good por­tion of the 75 per­cent of all records man­age­ment in North Amer­ica cur­rently being done in-house.

Best Per­sonal Regards,

Cary

BareMetal Data World 2009 October 7, 8, & 9 2009 — Registration and Agenda

Posted on Aug 12, 2009 in Records Management News

BareMetal Data World 2009 Octo­ber 7, 8, & 9 2009 — Reg­is­tra­tion and Agenda

Early Bird Reg­is­tra­tion has now been extended until close of busi­ness on Fri­day August 14, 2009. Reg­u­lar reg­is­tra­tion will still close Fri­day Sep­tem­ber 4, 2009.

The Con­fer­ence Page can be found on the Web­site at http://www.baremetaldata.com/resources/51.html

Agenda for BareMetal Data World 2009 Gay­lord Opry­land — Nashville, TN

Wednes­day Oct 7, 2009 Golf and Reg­is­tra­tion /Welcome Reception

Day 1 — Thurs­day Oct 8, 2009

0800 — 0900 Reg­is­tra­tion / Con­ti­nen­tal Breakfast

0900 — 0930 Round­table Break­fast Session

0930 — 1000 Speed Networking

1000 — 1100 Key Note Speaker

“The Chal­lenges of Data Pro­tec­tion at NASA”, Jonathan Pet­tus, Direc­tor, Office of the Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer, NASA Mar­shall Space Flight Center

1100 — 1115 Morn­ing Break

1115 — 1155 Pre­sen­ta­tion 1 “Swine Flu” Dr William S. Paul, MD, MPH — Direc­tor of Health — Metro Pub­lic Health Depart­ment of Nashville/Davidson County

1205 — 1245 Pre­sen­ta­tion 2 “Inter­est­ing things we’re see­ing — Mak­ing the most of the tough econ­omy.” Geof­frey Nes­now — Iron Mountain

1245 — 1345 Lunch

1345 — 1430 Pre­sen­ta­tion 3 “Reg­u­la­tory Com­pli­ance” Mark Burnette

1440 — 1520 Pre­sen­ta­tion 4 TBA

1520 — 1535 After­noon Break

1535 — 1615 Pre­sen­ta­tion 5 “Get­ting Ready for Backup to the Cloud: The Risks and Rewards of Deliv­er­ing Disk-Based Backup in 2010 and Beyond” Jerome Wendt

1620 — 1650 Pre­sen­ta­tion 6 “eDis­cov­ery — Past, Present and Future” Quin Gre­gor Strate­gic, COO — Data Reten­tion LLC

1800 — 1900 Bus to Con­fer­ence Dinner

1900 — 2130 Con­fer­ence Din­ner Gen­eral Jack­son Showboat

Day 2 — Fri­day Oct 9, 2009

0800 — 0900 Con­ti­nen­tal Breakfast

0900 — 1000 Fri­day Key Note Speaker “Focus: Value and Integrity in Sales” Cary McGov­ern — The FileMan

1015 — 1100 Pre­sen­ta­tion 7 “Insur­ance Needs for the Data Pro­tec­tion Indus­try” Ken­neth S. Fontana, Vice Pres­i­dent, Insur­ance Risk Man­agers of MO, Inc.

1100 — 1115 Morn­ing Break

1115 — 1200 Pre­sen­ta­tion 8 “Web Mar­ket­ing” Donna Arbie­man — Drum PR

1215 — 1300 Pre­sen­ta­tion 9 Panel Dis­cus­sion — “Right Media, Right Worko­rder, Right Client — Every­time” Panel: Ken Hall, Mar­vin Parker and Eric Haas

1300 — 1400 Lunch

1400 — 1445 Pre­sen­ta­tion 10 “Sell­ing a Media Vault or Box Stor­age Busi­ness” Bill Quiros

1445 — 1530 Pre­sen­ta­tion 11 “The Dif­fer­ences Between Local and Remote Backup and Restore” Joy Burd — ROBOBAK

1530 Con­fer­ence Close

Who really profits from digital medical records? “a giveaway to technology vendors whose sales will be subsidized by taxpayers”

Posted on Aug 12, 2009 in Records Management News

Read the entire arti­cle at http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/DN-healthrecords_14bus.ART0.State.Edition2.4bb476e.html

Who really prof­its from dig­i­tal med­ical records?

12:00 AM CDT on Tues­day, July 14, 2009

By DAVE MICHAELS and JASON ROBERSON / The Dal­las Morn­ing News Dave Michaels reported from Wash­ing­ton, and Jason Rober­son from Dallas.

An unprece­dented effort to com­put­er­ize the nation’s hos­pi­tals and physi­cian offices could be the key to reduc­ing crip­pling health care costs – or a give­away to tech­nol­ogy ven­dors whose sales will be sub­si­dized by taxpayers.

A Ser­vice of File­Man Research

Best Per­sonal Regards,

Cary … FileMan