Top 10 Reasons You Need Records And Information Management

The amount of data organizations generate and store multiplies exponentially each year. (This includes content in applications like Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange and internal/external social media sites.) Managing the growth and variety of such content, as well as its locations, becomes an impossible process. And, when you also factor into the equation the evolving industry and government regulations for information retention policies, you also realize there’s more at stake than the inconvenience of losing an invoice. There are risks of audits, lost productivity and the possibility of making a bad business decision based on old information.

In this age, adopting a records and information management policy is necessary for your organization — not just to minimize the risks associated with eDiscovery, but to protect sensitive data and manage large amounts of data stored across your enterprise.

On top of the complexity of managing your organization’s critical information and ensuring you can adapt to evolving regulatory requirements, let’s consider the costs associated with keeping volumes and volumes of unneeded information. It’s more than just having a repository to store your enterprise content – you need to be able to locate, present and analyze your enterprise-wide information. Storing massive amounts of information is worthless if you cannot access it quickly and accurately report on it.

U.S.-based companies spend $25 to $35 billion processing (filing, storing, and retrieving) paper. Management of documents over their life cycle pushes that figure up to $100 billion per year. – IDC

As mentioned, it can be extremely costly, and from storage costs to legal costs, you can inadvertently set yourself up for unnecessary risk when you hold on to unneeded information. That obsolete information can be discovered during legal cases or even distributed, in turn creating exposure to legal costs as well as fines and penalties.

In order to meet today’s standard for efficient records management, your organization needs an easy-to-use, comprehensive solution that takes into account not just your information management but your information governance plan as well. 

Why Your Organization Needs Records Management

1. Ensure regulatory compliance –confidently adhere to your organization’s immediate and future, legal, regulatory and industry compliance policies.

2. Adapt to changes in regulatory rules – be prepared to adapt to the ever-changing and evolving industry and government regulations regarding information retention policies.

3. Reduce legal risk – minimize legal risk, as well as the risk of fines and penalties, due to keeping error-prone, obsolete data that could have been destroyed.

4. Manage growing variety, volume and location of content –manage the complex and diverse variety of high-volumes of corporate information, including content in applications like Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and social locations, such as Lync and Yammer.

5. Lockdown or set aside information for legal for eDiscovery – easily set aside or lockdown information for legal holds that may be required during litigation.

6. Lower eDiscovery costs – reduce eDiscovery costs by quickly and accurately locating and presenting requested content stored in smaller files for discovery during litigation.

7. Minimize effort from everyday users – reduce the impact to your everyday users by implementing a simplified, automated method for maintaining a consistent policy acknowledged enterprise-wide on all of your content.

8. Cut volumes of unneeded or obsolete data – minimize storage costs and risk by disposing of obsolete information and minimizing the risk of outdated information being used or distributed.

9. View a record’s historical lifecycle – allow knowledge workers to quickly and easily see when a record was created as well as its entire lifecycle and audit history.

10. Make policies easy to understand and follow – give anyone access to view your organization’s file plan to understand the lifecycle and policies on any type of data.

Bottom line: A records management system will help you increase efficiency and productivity, ease your mind by ensuring you are complying with ever-changing regulatory requirements, and reduce storage costs and the risk of fines and penalties due to keeping obsolete data beyond its lifetime.

Get started on learning the basics when it comes to setting up your own Records Information Management (RIM) program. And, as you learn more about that, you might want to check into further protecting your organization by designing an information governance initiative.