As for the elusive paperless office, a DM system will--in theory--reduce the number of documents that must be printed out and stored. This could meet with some resistance. People like their paper. If, as Alvin Toffler says, "Making paper copies of anything is a primitive use of machines and violates their very spirit," then most of our PCs must be near suicidal. We don't expect to see a paperless office any- time soon.
If you don't own an RM system, buying a DM suite with integrated RM is a must. These United States harbor a litigious society. The ability to produce a record to support a corporate action can be a lifesaver.
SEAN DOHERTY is a technology editor and lawyer based at our Syracuse University Real-World Labs. A former project manager and IT engineer at Syracuse University, he helped develop centrally supported applications and storage systems. Write to him at [email protected].
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If your data professionals are doing their jobs, you no doubt suffer from document bloat. All the content created and edited on computers and delivered via e-mail is saved on your corporate file systems, backed up on a regular basis and archived. You may have miles of tape containing multiple versions of memos, letters, contracts and e-mail messages. This is good for disaster recovery, but it's bad if you get sued: If you don't have a record-retention policy to restrict the amount of archived nonbusiness-related content, you risk e-mail messages or document drafts becoming smoking guns in a lawsuit.
An effective retention policy will identify documents and records that you are required by law to keep--those necessary for operational, historical and legal purposes--and will retain them for the required periods only. Your policy should distinguish between business and nonbusiness communications and ruthlessly weed out the latter. Much of this process can be automated with an RM system coupled with DM capabilities. For more on building a data-retention policy, see "The Rules of Electronic Record-Keeping,".The Sarbanes-Oxley Act cannot be underestimated as a driver for formalizing document and records management. SOX will come into play for large enterprises (more than $75 million in market cap) on Nov. 15, while smaller companies have until April 15, 2005, to comply.
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