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