Press Releases

'All or nothing attitude' to document management is stifling business

~ not all documents are equal, cautions Iron Mountain ~

August 9, 2005 - A desire to be safe, not sorry, when it comes to corporate governance could ultimately prove to be an organisation's downfall, Iron Mountain is warning.

According to the world leader in records management, the requirement to comply with laws such as the Freedom of Information Act, Sarbanes-Oxley and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is leading to a boom in record retention, but not necessarily record management in some organisations. Ironically, this lack of intelligent prioritisation of data will ultimately prove to be the company's Achilles heel. Faced with what is effectively the entire document history of their organisation, staff will find it difficult to meet requests for information retrieval in a timely manner.

The growth in requests for email records in legal cases has placed further pressure on companies. Saving all emails, mistakenly believed to be the safest policy, leads to rising costs and increased retrieval difficulty but many organisations fail to consider alternatives. By archiving emails, categorising them according to the likelihood of retrieval requests, and applying different service levels accordingly, companies can vastly reduce costs.

Iron Mountain has found that organisations find it difficult to know which documents to store long-term, which will need to be retrieved on a regular basis and which to destroy. As such, few companies have any kind of active, intelligent records management in place.

In response, Iron Mountain has pulled together the four 'pillars' of effective records management:

1. Consistency - one of the most important tests of a legally credible records management system is that similar records are treated in a similar manner. As such, consistency has to be applied in the design and implementation of records retention and destruction policies across all media types, geography and business units. Consistency also applies to information privacy, policies and procedures.
2. Accountability - if records management is to be taken seriously, it needs leadership: Not only must there be a dedicated team responsible for records management, employees must also understand why policies are in place, and know what must be done to enforce compliance.
3. Adoption - simply creating a records management policy isn't enough to protect an organisation from accusations of neglect or fraud. Instead, a company must create a programme that includes rollout and training; communication, and reporting and review of the policies in place.
4. Accessibility - the success of a records management system often hinges on the ability to retrieve information for business support, litigation response or compliance reasons in a timely manner. Companies must think about their retrieval needs and create a common and logical indexing procedure, with an eye towards accessibility.

""Not all documents are created equal," said Andy Maurice, head of consultancy, Iron Mountain. "If organisations are to truly get to grips with corporate governance and issues such as Freedom of Information, there needs to be a judicious separation between 'records' and the rest of the papers, files and memos that typically make up an organisation. There is no need to keep everything, and any attempt to do so will ultimately become self-defeating as the company in question becomes mired in its own document mismanagement."