Why Information Management and Compliance is Important for Business Today By Martin Bradley
The shocking events in New Orleans in recent weeks have brought to the fore not only questions about the ability of the US Government to respond to internal crises, but also about how businesses approach the identification and safekeeping of their Vital Records for business continuity purposes.
An article on the Information Week website noted in the wake of the disaster that
A critical question for any rebuilding is whether business, bank and municipal records are salvageable… After the Sept. 11 attacks, firms housed in the World Trade Center struggled with the loss of payroll and other business records, if they didn’t have backups at another location.
Of course Vital Records Protection is just one element of a Records Management Policy, which to companies in the USA, UK and Australia is as common and essential as having a Health & Safety Policy, yet has only started to come to the fore in the Irish Private Sector in the last couple of years.
Aside from legal compliance with a wide swathe of legislation such as the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, Safety Health and Welfare at Work Act 1989, Electronic Commerce Act 2000, the Data Protection Act (including the Data Protection (Amendment) Act 2003), not to mention international requirements such as Basel II, MiFID and Sarbanes Oxley, there are strong administrative and economic incentives to implement proper a Records Management Policy.
As a rule of thumb about 40% of what is held in offices can be classed as extraneous – the savings in the physical cost of storage and the manpower needed to perform it can be significant. Money can also be saved by helping organisations lay their hands on the information they need, when they need it. The average organisation makes 19 copies of each document, spends €120 in labour searching for a lost/misfiled document, loses 1 out of every 20 documents and office workers can each spend 400 hours per year looking for lost files. As between 1% & 5% of all documents are misfiled this is not really surprising. The potential for cost savings is significant and provide fairly quick return on the investment in establishing the Policy.
It is essential that an organisation’s Records Management Policy also address newer communication technology. There is no doubt that email, messaging and SMS have opened up a can of worms for many organisations. For instance many firms involved in share trading have had to freeze their employees out from Instant Messaging products such as Yahoo/MS Messenger for fear of sensitive information being leaked. The real danger is that employees view these forms of communication as being personal, whereas they are in fact business transactions. They can be easily traced to the issuing organisation so a very clear policy must be in place for these services to ensure that nothing libellous or containing sensitive business information about your company or its clients is inadvertently passed on.
The true value of Records Management can be easily ascertained by carrying out a basic cost/benefit analysis. Is the cost of hiring consultants for a couple of weeks greater or lesser than the risks inherent in a compliance breach, having to replace lost data in the event of a fire or flood and staff inefficiency through poor Records Management.
About Martin Bradley:
Martin is a professional Archivist and has been a provider of Records Management Consultancy to the State, Semi-State and Private Sectors since 1997. Since May 2005 Martin has been the Executive Director of Archives Consulting Services Ltd a company formed to meet the increasing demand for consultancy in this area. Martin can be contacted at Tel: 1850 78 67 48 Email: info@archives.ie or Web: www.archivesconsult.com
