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 DID YOU KNOW?For every sales increase of $100 million, a company uses 8.8 million more sheets of paper. Source: PriceWaterhouseCoopers |
August 2008: In This Issue
Dear Records Manager,If there is ever a contest for the most frequently asked question in RM, we'd vote for "how long do I keep my records?" It's a good question, because there is as much risk in keeping them for too long as there is in destroying them too early. Clearly, accurately assessing how long you should keep documents – electronic and paper – is crucial for operational, legal and regulatory reasons. To help you do this, we've created a TAB Guide to Taking the Risk Out of Records Retention. And back in June we asked "How has records management changed within your organization?" One thing in particular that came through in the responses is that the march of RM from the fileroom into the boardroom continues! We've put together a great article summarizing our survey findings! Your feedback is valuable to us, so if you have any thoughts on this issue, please get in touch. Regards, 1. TAB Guide: Taking the Risk Out of Records Retention
So - what do you keep and for how long? What about electronic documents? What are today's very best practices, and how will your company benefit by implementing them? Get completely clear on records retention with our free guide. You'll learn:
Download our comprehensive and informative guide here. 2. Survey Results: The Evolving Role of Records Management
The response was excellent, and the information we received creates an interesting picture of the state of our discipline in 2008. In reviewing the data, it became clear that records management is gaining visibility and importance across organizations everywhere. In this article we'll take a look at what this means, how and why this is happening, and the effects this new attention is having on records management. Changing Focus What makes records management different from other business functions is that it is part of every business process. For many reasons, from traditional storage and access issues to new challenges of compliance, e-discovery and the hybrid environment, organizations are beginning to understand that this unique aspect of RM can help them address a number of their issues. Accordingly, RM is changing from a strictly administrative function to a legal and business process function. In short, many companies are beginning to focus on business support value inherent in good records management. RM Impact So what does this new focus mean? A significant number of our respondents noted a change in who they reported to, typically moving from corporate services or facilities management to the legal or IT department. And among those who have not changed their reporting structure, many respondents noted that they had increased access to c-level colleagues and were being asked to provide support to departments they previously had not. What came across very clearly as well was that this new focus has dramatically increased the workload and expectations of RM personnel everywhere. If you are feeling under the gun, you aren't alone! Priorities and Benchmarks Not surprisingly, this new environment is bringing about change in both the issues that are top of mind for records managers as well as the way the success of RM programs are gauged. Our survey indicated the top three priorities as:
Interestingly, the benchmarks used to gauge the success of an RM program remained in line with what we have typically seen over the last decade, with the top three being:
The Challenges Evolve Too As the role of RM changes and it goes "enterprise wide", touching new personnel and departments, almost all of our respondents reported that this was creating new problems around "buy-in", education and participation. These could be summed up as the four c's of change management:
Clearly, communicating the goals of RM combined with good training and education programs will be the key to successful change management going forward. Reporting and Leverage Not surprisingly, our survey showed that where RM reports to influences how effective the program is. In fact the key to effective RM is for it to report to the senior executive with the greatest amount of leverage across the organization, whether that person is in compliance, finance, IT, legal, or another function. Show Me the Money It is up for debate, but our results indicate that the changing focus can mean increased budget for the RM function in an organization. How does your budget situation compare?
Given the state of the economy and widespread corporate belt-tightening, this can be seen as yet another positive sign that records management is gaining in importance. Our Conclusion Because records management provides solutions to a wide range of business challenges that organizations currently face, the function is quickly evolving from a strictly administrative function to a business support role. Accordingly, it is crucial for organizations to ensure that records management is reporting at the appropriate level and to the appropriate area. This evolution brings with it a number of new challenges, the most significant being change management across the enterprise. This will in turn make the right training and education programs essential for successful records management. Your Conclusion What do you think? Is RM moving to a wider business support role? Share your thoughts! 3. Professional Services: TAB SMART (Streamline. Manage. Access. Retain. Toss.)
The TAB SMART program includes:
For more information on the TAB SMART program, call 4. News: Life Sciences: What is a Record?There has been a lot of confusion about e-discovery and how a record is defined in the life sciences industry - some organizations believe that regulated content is the only content that has to have record classifications applied to it, which is not the case. 5. News: Unstructured Mess: The Risk of Bad RMA recent study from the U.K. reports that many companies still fail to effectively manage their "unstructured information" which can comprise 80 percent of their total data. It goes on to say that organizations that look beyond compliance and plan the implementation of a proper RM program will derive cost efficiencies.
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Legal compliance, archival requirements and other important factors make it crucial to be conservative when it comes to records retention. But keeping unnecessary records can expose your company to legal liability too — and wastes valuable storage space and resources.
In 
Reduce your storage costs. Improve access to your information. Minimize your exposure to risk.
Storage costs of unnecessary and inactive records represent a significant portion of a records management budget. Our TAB SMART (Streamline. Manage. Access. Retain. Toss.) program helps your organization reduce the amount of material it retains, and leads to lower costs for both on and off-site storage. We'll take your employees through a process of reviewing their records and determining which ones are not essential. By eliminating non-essential documents, both paper and electronic, we will help you decrease storage costs and increase employee productivity. Streamlining the information available to employees improves retrieval time and access to your records.