Editor’s Note: Second in a three-part series, What is Records Management?, where we outline significant RIM features: Protection, Records Lifecycle and Business Strength. This post, originally published on May 27, 2013, has been modified for relevancy and fresher examples, links and stats.
The practice of records management can be likened to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—the best-known theory of motivation that lists Safety, Belonging and Self-Actualization as terms to describe the pattern through which human motivations usually move. Similarly, once your sensitive documents are secure, the motivation for Records Managers to use and manage their archival records in a safe, orderly, offsite environment is the next step.
The question then becomes, how
does a company keep up with the various stages of its records’ lives?
A Quick Look at the Records Lifecycle
How to Manage the Records Lifecycle
In short, the days of keeping critical records filed in boxes strewn about the office are a thing of the past—it’s time to
organize your files library-style. It’s easy to see that of foremost concern is a
company’s ability to quickly access a record when the need arises, always feeling in control of all of the business’s valuable information. When necessary, records can be retrieved without wasting time sorting and shuffling through countless boxes.
Entrepreneur reports that the average company loses more than 20 percent of its productive capacity to “organizational drag,” otherwise known as red tape or unnecessary complexity.
First,
secure offsite records storage with proper indexing of files in place dramatically reduces costs related to managing files,
misallocated office storage space, and organizational drag.
Lastly having a
chain of custody is a big deal. The chain of custody keeps tabs of every document over its entire lifecycle. In short, it’s a log that tracks every file’s whereabouts, including a description of the document, who created the document, where and when it’s been distributed, who has the document now.
