Records Management Chicago | Concurrency, Inc.

Records Management is the practice of maintaining all the records of a company from the time they are created to the time they are disposed. This could include classifying, storing, securing, archival, and destruction of any or all records. Records are considered information that is important for the history, knowledge or legal defense of a company. Every organization needs a discipline approach for record keeping; it is vital to a company’s knowledge, legal defense, and regulatory compliance. A record’s management system should be uniform based on the company’s individual policies that are shaped by the work of the organization. There are many reasons why record management is important to a company however, here are a few leading reasons:

• Control the Creation and Growth of Records
• Reduce Operating Costs
• Improve Efficiency and Productivity
• Support Better Decision Making
• Preserve the Corporate Memory

The amount of paper in offices today continues to escalate even with the non-paper technologies that have come about. An effective program addresses creation limits and records retention in order to stabilize growth. The limits must be set it place by the generation of records or number of copies that are not needed to run and operate the business on a day-to-day basis.

Record keeping is not a free business, it requires administrative dollars for filing equipment, space and staffing to keep everything maintained and organized. However, by storing files off site your company could be saving thousands of dollars due to the fact that storing onsite is much more expensive than another location.

Record management is huge when it comes to saving your business time and energy. The time an employee spends searching for a missing or misplaced file is not productive and can waste valuable time. A good record management program can help with any organization including upgrades to the system so information is easily retrieved. The key to productivity and efficiency is having an effective index system that helps to facilitate the retrieval process as well as deliver information as quickly as possible.

In the business world today decision making is key for managers and senior management personnel. By implementing an enterprise-wide file organization system managers are able to easily acquire the information they are looking for. Records management can ensure that this is done properly through grade-A indexing and retrieval systems.

In every business it is important to preserve milestones, mistakes and everything in between. The institutional memory is an irreplaceable asset and is an important factor that can be easily overlooked. By using record management all the activities of the company are documented for future use that may be useful in management decisions and planning.

How to Develop a Record Management System?

Growing Technologies

In the past records management has been perceived as being only the management of records that are no longer in everyday use but still needs to be kept on file. In more modern terms record management should be viewed as the lifecycle process of a document from creation to disposition. With a more modern definition there comes a more modern way of technology for this process. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 includes features that can help companies implement and sustain integrated records management systems. Microsoft makes it possible for In-Place Records to exist; this makes it possible to have documents in place as records without having to move them to a Records Center. In SharePoint 2010 records and document are able to live side by side within the site they are created in as well as make it possible to apply different policies to different records or documents. A few other differences within Records Management between SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 include:

• Document ID
• Multi-Stage Retention
• Per-Item Audit Reports
• Hierarchal File Plans
• File Plan Report

A Document Id is when every individual document is able to be assigned a unique identifier that stays with the document until it is archived. The Multi-Stage Retention is a set of policies that can have multiple states that allows the user to specify the documents entire lifecycle as one policy. The Per-Item Audit Reports are able to generate customized audit reports about an individual record. Hierarchal File Plans can create deep folder structures and are able to manage retention length at each folder within the hierarchy. Additionally, the File Plan Report is when a company is able to generate status reports showing the number of items at each state of the plan along with the policies on each document. It is quite an improvement from SharePoint 2007 and increases a company’s productivity.

SharePoint 2010 not only has improved its applications it also has improved features that are enable within this platform.

• Content Organizer
• Email Integration with Content Organizer
• Hold and eDiscovery
• Metadata Navigation and Filtering
• Offline Synchronization for External Lists
• SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Features
• SharePoint Server Standard Site Features

Records Management is the process of maintaining the records of an organization from creation to disposition. This process can be intimidating but can be easily under control with an organized system and a little help from SharePoint 2010.