6 Ways Document Management and Records Management Differ

Posted on Feb 21, 2010 in Records Management News

By David Roe | Pub­lished Jan 25, 2010

With the grow­ing impor­tance of com­pli­ance and eDis­cov­ery issues for many com­pa­nies, it might be time to con­sider deploy­ing a records man­age­ment sys­tem. Chances are that your com­pany already uses some kind of doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem. The ques­tion is, will your doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem also sup­port records management?

At the core of this ques­tion is what is the dif­fer­ences between doc­u­ment man­age­ment and records man­age­ment. Let’s exam­ine six dif­fer­ences.
1. Doc­u­ments v Records
What are documents?

Doc­u­ments con­sist of infor­ma­tion or data that can be struc­tured or unstruc­tured and accessed by peo­ple in an orga­ni­za­tion.
What are records?

Records pro­vide evi­dence of the activ­i­ties of a given organization’s func­tion­ing and poli­cies. Records often have strict com­pli­ance require­ments regard­ing their reten­tion, access and destruc­tion, and gen­er­ally have to be kept unchanged. There are often very stiff penal­ties for not doing so.

By some esti­mates, and depend­ing on the com­pany, 90% or more of all doc­u­ments are records (mean­ing a por­tion of them are not!). Con­versely, all records are doc­u­ments.
2. DMS v RMS
Doc­u­ment Man­age­ment Soft­ware (DMS)

Doc­u­ment man­age­ment soft­ware was devel­oped to make it eas­ier for users with a shared pur­pose, usu­ally within an enter­prise, to access and man­age doc­u­ments. Another impor­tant abil­ity is that it also allows them col­lab­o­rate on those documents.

Com­mon access to the doc­u­ments is enabled by exis­tence of a library and/or a repos­i­tory within the sys­tem.
Records Man­age­ment Soft­ware (RMS)

RMS soft­ware is more con­cerned with iden­ti­fy­ing, stor­ing, main­tain­ing and man­ag­ing data that is used to describe events in an organization’s work cycle that are related to statu­tory, reg­u­la­tory, fis­cal or oper­a­tional activ­i­ties within the organization.

Unlike doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tems, record man­age­ment repos­i­to­ries are gen­er­ally focused on keep­ing only what is nec­es­sary for a spec­i­fied length of time.
3. Storage

One of the crit­i­cal dif­fer­ences between doc­u­ment and records man­age­ment relates to the rea­son and approach each takes to stor­ing doc­u­ments.
Doc­u­ment Man­age­ment And Storage

The prin­ci­pal rea­son for stor­ing the doc­u­ments in a doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem is so users who need to access the infor­ma­tion stored in those doc­u­ments can do so quickly and easily.

In gen­eral, these gen­er­al­ized elec­tronic doc­u­ment repos­i­to­ries pro­vide for the checking-in and out of doc­u­ments that can be revised and unlocked for future revi­sion, with ver­sion track­ing and his­to­ries.
Records Man­age­ment And Storage

Records man­age­ment requires that records be kept in their orig­i­nal for­mat in case they are needed for com­pli­ance or legal reasons.

Good records man­age­ment needs to place records in their proper con­text so that gen­er­ally they are kept in series, or in indexes deter­mined not by inter­nal, enterprise-dictated rules, but by exter­nal rules.

In fact, record keep­ing has become such an issue that in addi­tion to on-site records stor­age, many orga­ni­za­tions oper­ate an off-site records cen­ter too.
4. Auto­mated processes

While all com­pa­nies in the reg­u­la­tory or com­pli­ance zone have to spend a lot of time ensur­ing that their records and doc­u­ment man­age­ment do exactly what they’re sup­posed to do, many of the processes involved are now auto­mated.
Doc­u­ment Management

Auto­mated processes are one of the ele­ments that make doc­u­ment man­age­ment attrac­tive to com­pa­nies whether that means the mass cap­ture of doc­u­ments and place­ment of that infor­ma­tion in the repos­i­tory, or its place­ment in a records man­age­ment system.

In fact, auto­mated process are a core func­tion of these sys­tems con­trol­ling the document’s life cycle, secu­rity access con­trols and other key fea­tures like ver­sion con­trol and short-term storage.

These processes auto­mate work­flows so that the right actions are car­ried out on the right doc­u­ments by the right peo­ple at the right time.
Records Management

Records man­age­ment uses auto­mated processes to man­age records in a con­sis­tent man­ner no mat­ter what for­mat those records hap­pen to be in.

Elec­tronic record keep­ing sys­tems must be able to pre­serve not only the con­tent of those records, but also the con­text and struc­ture they came from and often for long period of times. The final records should be auditable in their orig­i­nal form long after they have been put in the records repos­i­tory.
5. Security

There is no get­ting away from the secu­rity and integrity of doc­u­ments in either sys­tem. The dif­fer­ence between the two, though, is that with doc­u­ment man­age­ment soft­ware secu­rity is desir­able, with records man­age­ment essen­tial.
Doc­u­ment Management

With doc­u­ment man­age­ment, secu­rity has to be placed in the con­text of doc­u­ment acces­si­bil­ity for users. Autho­rized users have to have quick access to infor­ma­tion with com­pre­hen­sive doc­u­ment man­age­ment secu­rity con­trol­ling access to the repository.

While all sys­tems will have means of track­ing who has been using a doc­u­ment, when it was checked it out and when they put it back in the repos­i­tory, and any changes that were made to the doc­u­ment — includ­ing new ver­sions — the secu­rity stan­dards are not nec­es­sar­ily as strin­gent as those required for keep­ing records.
Records Management

At the moment, the stan­dard to which records secu­rity and records secu­rity within records man­age­ment soft­ware is judged is the US Depart­ment of Defense 5015.2 regulations.

If a sys­tem is com­pli­ant with the DoD 5015.2 stan­dard or equiv­a­lent it sets the stan­dard for man­age­ment of records that will be even­tu­ally trans­ferred to the U.S. National Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion (NARA).

These include gov­ern­ment per­son­nel records, man­u­als, stan­dards, direc­tives and doc­u­ments that are sched­uled for declas­si­fi­ca­tion or redacted items. In Europe, MoReq 2 is the stan­dard applied across the entire EU as a stan­dard.
6. Dis­posal
Doc­u­ment Management

The dis­posal of doc­u­ments in a doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem occurs when the life cycle of the doc­u­ment has been com­plete and is no longer needed in the busi­ness process. While this can mean destruc­tion it can also means turn­ing them into records.

The deci­sion to turn a doc­u­ment into a record depends on the need of the com­pany and whether there are legal require­ments to hold onto the doc­u­ments.
Records Management

The destruc­tion of records is gen­er­ally reg­u­lated by law with strict pro­ce­dures so that the infor­ma­tion con­tained in them will not be dis­closed. Records man­age­ment soft­ware plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in this by imple­ment­ing reten­tion and destruc­tion sched­ules that are com­pli­ant with regulations.

How­ever, with pub­lic bod­ies, the records will not be phys­i­cally destroyed, but con­verted into a for­mat that is accept­able to U.S. National Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion (NARA), or National Archives of the coun­try you reside in.
Final Thoughts

Doc­u­ment man­age­ment soft­ware was cre­ated to make it eas­ier to use store, man­age and col­lab­o­rate on elec­tronic infor­ma­tion. Records man­age­ment soft­ware was designed to man­age the life cycle of records so that orga­ni­za­tions can eas­ily com­ply with reg­u­la­tions and sup­port the eDis­cov­ery process.

It’s very likely that you require both doc­u­ment and records man­age­ment capa­bil­i­ties within your orga­ni­za­tion. Depend­ing on your needs, a doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem may be able to sup­port most of your require­ments. Under­stand­ing the dif­fer­ence between doc­u­ment and records man­age­ment and the soft­ware that sup­ports each, should help you decide your next steps.

What is a Records Retention Schedule?

Posted on Feb 21, 2010 in Records Management News

http://www.epa.gov/records/what/quest6.htm

A Records Sched­ule (sched­ule) con­sti­tutes the EPA’s offi­cial pol­icy for records and infor­ma­tion reten­tion and dis­posal. The sched­ule pro­vides manda­tory instruc­tions for what to do with records (and non­record mate­ri­als) no longer needed for cur­rent Agency busi­ness. Records reten­tion and dis­posal should occur at reg­u­lar inter­vals in the nor­mal course of busi­ness of the Agency.

Other ben­e­fits of using the EPA Records Sched­ules are:

1.

Ensures that the impor­tant records are orga­nized and main­tained in such a way as to be eas­ily retrieved and iden­ti­fi­able as evi­dence of the pro­grams activ­i­ties (espe­cially in the event of an audit, a FOIA request or a dis­cov­ery for a law­suit).
2.

Con­serves office space and equip­ment by using fil­ing cab­i­nets to house only active records.
3.

Saves money by the reg­u­lar trans­fer of inac­tive files to less costly Fed­eral Record Cen­ter (FRC) stor­age areas for sub­se­quent dis­po­si­tion.
4.

Helps pre­serve those records that are valu­able for his­tor­i­cal or research pur­poses.
5. Sta­bi­lizes the growth of records in offices through sys­tem­atic dis­po­si­tion of unneeded records.

Each Fed­eral Agency is required by statute (36 CFR 1224) to main­tain a com­pre­hen­sive records sched­ule. This com­pre­hen­sive sched­ule is devel­oped by com­bin­ing the Gen­eral Records Sched­ules (con­tain­ing dis­posal author­ity for records com­mon to sev­eral or all agen­cies), pub­lished by the National Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion, with EPA-specific sched­ule items or record series.

Based on care­ful analy­sis of the Agency’s doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als, the sched­ules pro­vide instruc­tions for the reten­tion and dis­po­si­tion of each record series or sys­tem and of non­record mate­ri­als, and autho­rizes the sys­tem­atic removal of unneeded records from offices.

What is a Records Series?

Posted on Feb 21, 2010 in Records Management News

http://www.epa.gov/records/what/quest5.htm

A series is the basic unit for orga­niz­ing and con­trol­ling your files. Series are those file units or doc­u­ments kept together because they relate to a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject or func­tion, result from the same activ­ity, doc­u­ment a spe­cific type of trans­ac­tion, take a par­tic­u­lar phys­i­cal form, or have some other rela­tion­ship aris­ing out of their cre­ation, receipt, main­te­nance, or use.

The series con­cept is a flex­i­ble one, and pro­grams should be care­ful to cre­ate series by orga­niz­ing their doc­u­ments in ways that facil­i­tate man­age­ment of the records through­out their life cycle.

Each record series should be located sep­a­rately from all other records.

Each record series must be cov­ered by a records schedule

What is a Record?

Posted on Feb 21, 2010 in Records Management News

Source US Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency

http://www.epa.gov/records/what/quest2.htm

Records include all books, papers, maps, pho­tographs, machine read­able mate­ri­als, or other doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als, regard­less of phys­i­cal form or char­ac­ter­is­tics, made or received by an agency of the United States Gov­ern­ment under Fed­eral law or in con­nec­tion with the trans­ac­tion of pub­lic busi­ness and pre­served or appro­pri­ate for preser­va­tion by that agency or its legit­i­mate suc­ces­sor as evi­dence of the orga­ni­za­tion, func­tions, poli­cies, deci­sions, pro­ce­dures, oper­a­tions, or other activ­i­ties of the Gov­ern­ment or because of the infor­ma­tional value in them.
(Taken from 44 U.S.C. Chap­ter 33, Sec. 3301)

Sev­eral key terms, phrases, and con­cepts in the statu­tory def­i­n­i­tion of records are defined as follows:

1.

Doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als is a col­lec­tive term for records, non­record mate­ri­als, and per­sonal papers that refers to all media con­tain­ing recorded infor­ma­tion, regard­less of the nature of the media or the method(s) or circumstance(s) of record­ing.
2.

Regard­less of phys­i­cal form or char­ac­ter­is­tics means that the medium may be paper, film, disk, or other phys­i­cal type or form; and that the method of record­ing may be man­ual, mechan­i­cal, pho­to­graphic, elec­tronic, or any other com­bi­na­tion of these or other tech­nolo­gies.
3.

Made means the act of cre­at­ing and record­ing infor­ma­tion by agency per­son­nel in the course of their offi­cial duties, regard­less of the method(s) or the medium involved. The act of record­ing is gen­er­ally iden­ti­fi­able by the cir­cu­la­tion of the infor­ma­tion to oth­ers or by plac­ing it in files acces­si­ble to oth­ers.
4.

Received means the accep­tance or col­lec­tion of doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als by agency per­son­nel in the course of their offi­cial duties regard­less of their ori­gin (for exam­ple, other units of their agency, pri­vate cit­i­zens, pub­lic offi­cials, other agen­cies, con­trac­tors, Gov­ern­ment grantees) and regard­less of how trans­mit­ted (in per­son or by mes­sen­ger, mail, elec­tronic means, or by any other method). In this con­text, the term does not refer to mis­di­rected mate­ri­als. It may or may not refer to loaned or seized mate­ri­als depend­ing on the con­di­tions under which such mate­ri­als came into agency cus­tody or were used by the agency. Advice of legal coun­sel should be sought regard­ing the “record” sta­tus of loaned or seized mate­ri­als.
5.

Pre­served means the fil­ing, stor­ing, or any other method of sys­tem­at­i­cally main­tain­ing doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als by the agency. This term cov­ers mate­ri­als not only actu­ally filed or oth­er­wise sys­tem­at­i­cally main­tained but also those tem­porar­ily removed from exist­ing fil­ing sys­tems.
6.

Appro­pri­ate for preser­va­tion means doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als made or received which in the judg­ment of the agency should be filed, stored, or oth­er­wise sys­tem­at­i­cally main­tained by an agency because of the evi­dence of agency activ­i­ties or infor­ma­tion they con­tain, even though the mate­ri­als may not be cov­ered by its cur­rent fil­ing or main­te­nance proce

Why Records Management? Ten Business Reasons

Posted on Feb 21, 2010 in Records Management News

Why Records Man­age­ment? Ten Busi­ness Reasons

http://www.epa.gov/records/what/quest1.htm

Every busi­ness or pro­gram must address well-defined objec­tives which will add value, either directly to the bot­tom line or toward the achieve­ment of the organization’s goals and objec­tives. Records man­age­ment (RM) objec­tives usu­ally fall into one of three categories:

* Ser­vice (effec­tive and effi­cient),
* Profit (or cost-avoidance), and
* Social (moral, eth­i­cal and legal) responsibility.

Records man­age­ment pro­grams must man­age orga­ni­za­tional infor­ma­tion so that it is timely, accu­rate, com­plete, cost-effective, acces­si­ble and use­able. Bet­ter infor­ma­tion, at the right time, makes bet­ter business.

Records man­age­ment pro­grams are not gen­er­ally an organization’s pri­mary busi­ness, and even though RM pro­grams don’t usu­ally gen­er­ate income, the fol­low­ing are the most impor­tant rea­sons to set up a good records man­age­ment pro­gram in your office any­way. (Adapted from Ten Busi­ness Rea­sons for Records Man­age­ment in Infor­ma­tion and Records Man­age­ment: Document-based Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems, Robek, Brown, Stephens, 1995.)

1. To Con­trol the Cre­ation and Growth of Records

Despite decades of using var­i­ous non-paper stor­age media, the amount of paper in our offices con­tin­ues to esca­late. An effec­tive records man­age­ment pro­gram addresses both cre­ation con­trol (lim­its the gen­er­a­tion of records or copies not required to oper­ate the busi­ness) and records reten­tion (a sys­tem for destroy­ing use­less records or retir­ing inac­tive records), thus sta­bi­liz­ing the growth of records in all for­mats.
2. To Reduce Oper­at­ing Costs

Record­keep­ing requires admin­is­tra­tive dol­lars for fil­ing equip­ment, space in offices, and staffing to main­tain an orga­nized fil­ing sys­tem (or to search for lost records when there is no orga­nized system).

It costs $22 less per lin­ear foot of records to store inac­tive records in the Fed­eral Records Cen­ter ver­sus in the office. [Mul­ti­ply that by 30% to 50% of the records in an office that doesn’t have a records man­age­ment pro­gram in place], and there is an oppor­tu­nity to effect some cost sav­ings in space and equip­ment, and an oppor­tu­nity to uti­lize staff more pro­duc­tively — just by imple­ment­ing a records man­age­ment program.

Usu­ally, in an office that doesn’t have a records pro­gram, 30–50% of the files could be stored off-site. In EPA, we aver­age 25 feet of paper per per­son. In a 30 per­son office that could mean a sav­ings of $7,000 annu­ally!
3. To Improve Effi­ciency and Productivity

Time spent search­ing for miss­ing or mis­filed records is non-productive. A good records man­age­ment pro­gram can help any orga­ni­za­tion upgrade its record­keep­ing sys­tems so that infor­ma­tion retrieval is enhanced, with cor­re­spond­ing improve­ments in office effi­ciency and pro­duc­tiv­ity. A well designed and oper­ated fil­ing sys­tem with an effec­tive index can facil­i­tate retrieval and deliver infor­ma­tion to users as quickly as they need it.
4. To Assim­i­late New Records Man­age­ment Technologies

A good records man­age­ment pro­gram pro­vides an orga­ni­za­tion with the capa­bil­ity to assim­i­late new tech­nolo­gies and take advan­tage of their many ben­e­fits. Invest­ments in new com­puter sys­tems don’t solve fil­ing prob­lems unless cur­rent man­ual record­keep­ing sys­tems are ana­lyzed (and occa­sion­ally, over­hauled) before automa­tion is applied.
5. To Ensure Reg­u­la­tory Compliance

In terms of record­keep­ing require­ments, the United States is the most heav­ily reg­u­lated coun­try in the world. These laws can cre­ate major com­pli­ance prob­lems for busi­nesses and gov­ern­ment agen­cies since they can be dif­fi­cult to locate, inter­pret and apply. The only way an orga­ni­za­tion can be rea­son­ably sure that it is in full com­pli­ance with laws and reg­u­la­tions is by oper­at­ing a good records man­age­ment pro­gram which takes respon­si­bil­ity for reg­u­la­tory com­pli­ance, while work­ing closely with the Office of Gen­eral Coun­sel. Fail­ure to com­ply with laws and reg­u­la­tions could result in severe fines, penal­ties or other legal con­se­quences.
6. To Min­i­mize Lit­i­ga­tion Risks

Busi­ness orga­ni­za­tions imple­ment records man­age­ment pro­grams in order to reduce the risks asso­ci­ated with lit­i­ga­tion and poten­tial penal­ties. This can be equally true in Gov­ern­ment agen­cies. A con­sis­tently applied records man­age­ment pro­gram can reduce the lia­bil­i­ties asso­ci­ated with doc­u­ment dis­posal by pro­vid­ing for their sys­tem­atic, rou­tine dis­posal in the nor­mal course of busi­ness.
7. To Safe­guard Vital Information

Every orga­ni­za­tion, pub­lic or pri­vate, needs a com­pre­hen­sive pro­gram for pro­tect­ing its vital records and infor­ma­tion from cat­a­stro­phe or dis­as­ter, because every orga­ni­za­tion is vul­ner­a­ble to loss. Oper­ated as part of the over­all records man­age­ment pro­gram, vital records pro­grams pre­serve the integrity and con­fi­den­tial­ity of the most impor­tant records and safe­guard the vital infor­ma­tion assets accord­ing to a “Plan” to pro­tect the records.
8. To Sup­port Bet­ter Man­age­ment Deci­sion Making

In today’s busi­ness envi­ron­ment, the man­ager that has the rel­e­vant data first often wins, either by mak­ing the deci­sion ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion, or by mak­ing a bet­ter, more informed deci­sion. A records man­age­ment pro­gram can help ensure that man­agers and exec­u­tives have the infor­ma­tion they need when they need it.

By imple­ment­ing an enterprise-wide file orga­ni­za­tion, includ­ing index­ing and retrieval capa­bil­ity, man­agers can obtain and assem­ble per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion quickly for cur­rent deci­sions and future busi­ness plan­ning pur­poses.
9. To Pre­serve the Cor­po­rate Memory

An organization’s files con­tain its insti­tu­tional mem­ory, an irre­place­able asset that is often over­looked. Every busi­ness day, you cre­ate the records which could become back­ground data for future man­age­ment deci­sions and plan­ning. These records doc­u­ment the activ­i­ties of the Agency which future schol­ars may use to research the work­ings of the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency in the 1990’s.
10. To Fos­ter Pro­fes­sion­al­ism in Run­ning the Business

A busi­ness office with files askew, stacked on top of file cab­i­nets and in boxes every­where, cre­ates a poor work­ing envi­ron­ment. The per­cep­tions of cus­tomers and the pub­lic, and “image” and “morale” of the staff, though hard to quan­tify in cost-benefit terms, may be among the best rea­sons to estab­lish a good records man­age­ment pro­gram.
Source Envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion Agency