Electronic Recordkeeping
Most ECM, or Enterprise Content Management software systems, have the inherent capability to manage electronic records. In fact, they are certified US DoD 5015.2 compliant. However each ECM is vastly different. Many organizations have implemented ECM and used these records management capabilities, but end user uptake and user acceptance failed. Why? There are certain inviolable principals that are essential to successful electronic recordkeeping success. They are: Qualification How users decide which documents to manage as business records. Declaration Users have to decide that a particular document is a business record. Which ones? Similarly, when creating a document, at which point will they turn it over to the organization as a business record? Classification Each record must be assigned an appropriate retention rule from the approved list of rules, or retention schedule. If users consistently qualify appropriately, declare the documents as records, and properly classify them, we can proceed with Disposition, where we will destroy records in accordance with the official approved retention schedule. Disposition is the “end game”, where everything comes together in a way that allows us to accurately destroy massive quantities of recorded business records with full legal confidence. If declared records are not classified correctly, too many would be destroyed too early or too late, which could prevent any disposition from taking place at all. Each of these three factors (qualify, declare, classification) is in fact a critical project measurement metric. Everything in any electronic recordkeeping endeavour contributes in some way, however indirectly, to one of these three factors. Each factor can, and must, be measured against an acceptable threshold. Any organization can readily agree upon a minimum acceptable threshold for each of these three factors. Each of these three factors is easily measured, and must be regularly measured, by department, on a regular basis. Further, we need to “hit” all three to succeed. We cannot fail on any of the three, or the entire project will fail. Put another way, if we cannot run Disposition with complete confidence, which is based on the accuracy of the classification, the project simply is not successful. Put another way, if we do not consistently qualify documents, we do not know what records we have. If we do not declare qualified documents as records, we cannot manage them. If we do not classify records properly, we cannot achieve disposition. Hence, all three are required – we cannot succeed without all three.
We believe these failures are the result of our failure to focus on the soft side of the projects – cultural change. Over 75% of a modern electronic recordkeeping project should focus on the cultural change required to make the software function properly.
