Outsourcing records management saves costs, frees resources

Managing records is a real pain for most companies, says Paul Mullon, divisional director of marketing at Metrofile. They keep far too many records, resulting in inefficient space utilisation and increased costs in office space, printing, paper and computer storage.

Managing records is something that few people wake up to in the morning with anticipation, wondering how many records they can manage that day for their organisation, or how many records they can generate as they have the desire to manage them effectively.

Record management is thrust upon organisations by corporate governance issues, legislation, and customer service requirements, not from the desire to hold onto lots of pieces of paper for as long as possible.

Despite this, the interesting contradiction is that almost all organisations hold too many records. As a general rule, 60%-70% too many records are found in prime office space.

There are many reasons for this. The four key reasons are:

* A hoard-it mentality - in SA Africa and worldwide, people tend to have a "let`s keep it just in case" mentality. Sadly, with that seldom goes the "destroying on time" discipline.

* Because of corporate governance and legislation, many people are reluctant to destroy anything that could possibly be a corporate record, so they keep everything.

* The sheer volume of information that flows around organisations makes it very difficult to manage records, and because it is a non-core task, people don`t take the time to decide what they do need to keep or not, so the volume of information mounts up.

* The ease with which electronic information can spread through an organisation, such as an e-mail attachment. The attachment is saved onto various hard drives, a copy is kept in the inbox and another copy is in the outbox, as the recipient sends it on to multiple other people. The result is there are three copies of the same information on each desktop. Theoretically, this is good from a knowledge management perspective, as information is spread throughout an organisation, but from a records management point of view it is a nightmare.

Records management principles state that companies need to protect the original of corporate records, but who has the responsibility, wherewithal and systems, policies and procedures to ensure the protection of the "original"? The problem is compounded by the fact that half the recipients of an e-mail will print it out and have yet another "original".

Organisations are often not properly equipped to manage information as records. The result is that they end up with a lot of information that is non-record data and does not need to be kept for legislation reasons or business purposes, in addition to hoarding many duplicates that also don`t need to be kept.

At a recent conference of the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA), a rule of thumb was widely espoused that, of the information stored in organisations - in filing cabinets, archive rooms, basements, credenzas and in all forms of electronic media - probably only one-third needs to be kept in offices in an active form. Of the remaining two-thirds, with a little thought and investigation, probably half will become immediately apparent not to be a record, and hence it should be destroyed, or plainly a duplicate and hence also destroyed.

The remaining third is information that is seldom retrieved and only needs to be viewed in exceptional circumstances, such as in the case of litigation, end of life of contract or some other similar matter.

This type of archive or non-active information should not be kept in expensive real estate - either in office space or on hi-tech computer equipment. Putting an archive record into a fancy database, with the associated costs of administrators, backups, server rooms and specialised equipment, is overkill for the type of information it holds.

It should rather be sent off-site to the lowest cost, lowest speed retrieval system possible. When the information is required, a one or two-day turnaround time is generally adequate, as it doesn`t require a system that will deliver sub-millisecond response times.

One of the benefits of outsourcing is organisations can get a subjective view of what documents need to be retained - either for legislative or business reasons.

All the above said and done, there are not many companies which have the culture, time, knowledge, wherewithal, interest, or expertise to put the systems, procedures, processes and policies in place to manage this.

Records management doesn`t happen naturally and the thinking and processes behind it need to be developed by specialists, and also maintained on an ongoing basis and revised where necessary as legislation or business requirements change, to ensure it continues to run smoothly and cost-effectively.

Developing the policies and processes, implementing them, training staff, moving documents from an active to a semi-active to an archive state, ensuring destructions take place, and managing electronic, physical and microfilm documents are not the core business of companies, and any money spent in fulfilling these functions should be with specialist service providers, not with poorly trained and ill-equipped staff.