The Challenge

An interesting challenge for Records Managers, Knowledge Managers and CIOs is the newer document management paradigm of being asked to manage all content according to the ‘Records-In-Place’ paradigm, without a single central repository. That is, to be responsible for all content across a myriad of locations controlled by a myriad of applications and a myriad of departments/organizations and people.

We all realize that Enterprise Content Management, or Content Services as it is now called by Gartner, is a moving target, constantly evolving with new challenges and new paradigms.

For example:  

• How do we filter out only relevant information from social media?
• How do we avoid capturing personal data and being culpable under privacy laws?
• How do we capture all emails containing sexism, racism and bullying without being guilty of an invasion of privacy of the individual?
• How do we meet all of our compliance obligations when our staff are spread across multiple states/counties/provinces and multiple countries with different legislation and compliance requirements?

All weighty challenges for the modern Records Manager, Knowledge Manager or CIO. Now we have a new challenge, how to manage multiple silos of information without a central repository.

Multi-Repository (multi-Silo) Systems

In multiple-repository systems we find multiple document stores or silos, local files, network file shares, local data bases, multiple file servers, multiple copies of SharePoint and multiple Cloud repositories like Dropbox, Box, iCloud, Google Cloud Storage and other hosted document storage. The CIO may proudly claim to manage multiple information silos but what he or she really has is a laissez faire document management ecosystem that may well be centrally monitored (hopefully) but is most certainly not centrally managed.

In the multiple silo model, the documents in our multiple locations are ‘managed’ by multiple people and multiple and independent applications (e.g., SharePoint, Google Docs, Office 365, etc.). We may have implemented another layer of software above all these diverse applications trying to keep up with what is happening but If I am just ‘watching’ then I don’t have an inviolate copy and I don’t have any control over what happens to the document. I am unable to enforce any standards. There is no ‘standard’ central control over versioning or retention and no control over the document life cycle or chain of evidence.

For example, you wouldn’t know if the document had since been moved to a different location that you are not monitoring. You wouldn’t know if it had been deleted. You wouldn’t know its relationship to other documents and processes in other silos. You wouldn’t know its context in your enterprise and therefore you wouldn’t know how relevant this document was. The important distinction is that under the multiple silo model you are ‘watching’ not managing; other multiple pieces of software are managing the life cycles and dispositions of the documents independently.

All you really know is that at a certain point in time a document existed and what its properties were at that time (e.g., historical ‘natural’ Metadata such as original filename, author, date created, etc.). However, you have no contextual Metadata, no transactional Metadata, no common indexing and no common Business Classification System. In this case, you don’t have a document management system, you have a laissez faire document management ecosystem, an assortment of independently ‘managed’ information silos. Most importantly, you are not able to link documents to business processes that transcend organizational structures and silos.

What are the issues?

Sure, SharePoint and Cloud silos make collaboration easier but at what cost? What can’t we do with this multi-silo ecosystem? Why doesn’t this solution meet the best-practice objectives of an enterprise Document Management System? What are the major areas where it falls short? How does the proliferation of multiple silos and content repositories affect us? What are our risks? Here is my assessment of the major shortfalls of this ‘Records-In-Place’ paradigm.

We are unable to: 

1. extract the critical insights that enterprise information should provide
2. define all the relationships that link documents to enterprise business processes
3. find the right information at the right time
4. provide a single access point for all content
5. Implement an effective, consistent enterprise-wide document security system
6. effectively protect against natural or man-made disasters
7. produce evidence-standard documents
8. minimize document handling costs
9. guarantee the integrity of a document
10. guarantee that a document is in fact the most recent version
11. guarantee that a document is not an older copy
12. minimize duplicate and redundant information
13. meet critical compliance targets like Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the HIPAA
14. create secure, searchable archives for digital content
15. effectively secure all documents against loss
16. implement common enterprise version control
17. facilitate enterprise collaboration
18. Improve timeliness
19. manage enterprise document security and control
20. manage smaller and more reliable backups
21. achieve the lowest possible document management and archiving costs
22. deliver the best possible knowledge management access and search
23. guarantee consistent content
24. optimize management and executive time
25. standardize the types of documents and other content can be created within an organization.
26. define common use template to use for each type of document
27. standardize the Metadata required for each type of document
28. standardize where to store a document at each stage of its life cycle
29. control access to a document at each stage of its life cycle
30. move documents within the organization as team members contribute to the documents' creation, review, approval, publication, and disposition
31. implement a common set of policies that apply to documents so that document-related actions are audited, documents are retained or disposed of properly, and content that is important to the organization is protected
32. manage when and if a document has to be converted from one format to another as it moves through the stages of its life cycle
33. guarantee that all documents are treated as corporate records, that common retention policies are applied determining which documents must be retained according to legal requirements and corporate guidelines
34. guarantee enterprise-wide Regulatory compliance
35. produce an enterprise-wide audit trail
36. share information across departmental and/or silo boundaries
37. centrally manage the security access to documents/information across different areas of the organization
38. consistently classify documents as each repository may be used by a different department and be classified differently  
39. identify duplicates based on document name
40. easily find things based on metadata, as it wouldn’t be common across repositories
41. control access via AD single sign on
42. access all enterprise documents using a single license
43. centrally audit access and changes to metadata

What are your risks?  

Your risks are huge!

According to various industry surveys, 65% to 75% of companies still have no systems in place to manage email records. Based on my own observations and dialog with Knowledgeone Corporation’s customers and prospects, I would say the percentage is far higher; say 85% or more. My guess is that the industry surveys inadvertently included a number of email ‘cleaning’ systems as email management systems; thereby skewing the figures.

Given that there is now a variety of proven email management systems (like Knowledgeone Corporation’s GEM) available for most email servers (e.g., Exchange, GroupWise and Notes) and given the enormous danger of unmanaged email it is, on the surface, difficult to explain the apparent reluctance of organizations to implement email management policies and systems.

My own experience leads me to believe that the following are the major reasons organizations do not take this critical step:

1. Lack of ownership and leadership

Email management transects all of the traditional vertical organizational boundaries. There may well be an IT person in charge of the email servers but there is rarely a senior management person in charge of email organization-wide. That is, no one person actually ‘owns’ the problem and no one person has the authority to implement an organization-wide solution.

2. Lack of an understanding of the problem and of the solution

Most of the people who are senior enough in an organization to be aware of this problem do not comprehend the complexities of the problem. They have dialogs with IT people who explain the issues in technical terms, not in business or risk-management terms. Email management should come under an organization’s risk management regime because that is where a great deal of risk lies.

3. Lack of desire to solve the problem plus active opposition to a solution

There are a large number of IT people and others in every organization who simply do not want their emails managed, analysed, scrutinized, indexed and saved. This fact is never going to change and must always be addressed at a senior level by the person responsible for risk management policies and practice. Uncooperative and/or recalcitrant employees should not be allowed to put an organization at risk no matter what their position in the management hierarchy.

4. Confusion over what is involved in complying with a plethora of laws and regulations

One hundred percent of what well-meaning bureaucrats and politicians have done to ‘solve’ what they see as email privacy issues has been badly thought out, badly drafted and counterproductive; simply ill-informed, knee-jerk reactions. As you can see, I am no fan of politicians and bureaucrats who pass knee-jerk laws without understanding or caring about the full implications.

As far as I am concerned the privacy issue is secondary to the fact that every employer has to right to determine how its resources are used. Every employer has the right to protect itself. Every employer has the right to tell its employees if private emails are allowed or not. Every employer has the right to tell its employees what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in an email.

Solving the so called privacy policy is dead easy; herewith is the McKenna solution.

Tell employees that:

1. Private emails are not allowed and all emails will be scrutinized for inappropriate content; or

2. Private emails are allowed (in moderation) but that all emails, including private emails, will be scrutinized for inappropriate content; or

3. Private emails are allowed (in moderation) but that they MUST be identified by the keyword “Private” (or a word or phrase of your choice) in the subject line. All emails without the keyword “Private” in the subject line will be scrutinized for inappropriate content.

5. Confusing and misleading claims by companies marketing email management systems

It is a complex problem (have you ever tried to set up a multi-server email system in a large organization?) often poorly understood and poorly explained by the sales person. Add to this the fact that the sales person is usually speaking to the IT person (who lives in a different universe) who then has to ‘translate’ what he thinks the sales person said to senior management. Too often, the harried sales person, under intense pressure from the IT interrogator, will simply say “Yes” without really understanding the question or its implications.

My best advice to senior management is that if they don’t fully understand, keep asking questions until they do or, seek assistance from an independent authority. It is just plain dumb and dangerous to sign something off you don’t really understand.

6. Multiple and conflicting objectives

Is your objective to simply be aware of everything that is in your email store or is it to also meet a plethora of complex and competing regulations and certification standards?

Have you inadvertently set the goal post too high? Have you made the problem many times more complex than it should be? Has it become a “Wish List” instead of a requirement? Is the selection of a suitable product always held up by someone demanding that it has to also do something else? Has your horse now morphed into a camel?

My best advice? Why don’t you try ‘Getting wet slowly’ and review your needs again when the basic but critical email management problem is solved?

In the end it is about ownership, understanding and will. If just one senior person with the necessary authority understands the problem and commits to a solution then it will happen. The solutions are out there; they are just waiting for a committed purchaser with a clear and simple view of what needs to be achieved.

You must be aware of what is in your email store and you must be alerted to infringements before they grow into expensive problems. You can’t do this without an email management system in place.

Is it jobs or useless paper records?

It is my belief that all over the western world companies and government agencies are wasting enormous amounts of money maintaining boxes of paper on the dusty but lucrative shelves of offsite storage companies like Grace Records Management, Iron Mountain and Crown Records Management. In total, it must be hundreds of millions (I know of one Australian company that spends a million dollars a year on offsite storage at multiple offsite repositories and doesn’t even know what its holdings are) or even billions of dollars a year; most of it wasted.

It is almost enough for me to dive into debt to build an offsite storage facility and then buy a few vans and shredders. I say almost because I am not a hypocrite and I wouldn’t be able to sell a service to my customers I didn’t believe in. For the life of me, I cannot understand why senior management delegates this level of expenditure to junior or mid-level managers when it really should be scrutinized at board level like every other significant cost.

Even the advent of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) beginning in 2008 doesn’t seem to have woken up senior management or board members to this area of massive waste. Instead, big corporations and government are ‘saving money’ laying off staff and outsourcing jobs to third world and developing countries. Where is the sense in that when there are easier and less disruptive and more ‘humane’ savings to be made by simply reducing the money being paid to store useless paper records that will never be referenced again? How would you feel if management laid you off because they thought it was more important to keep paying for boxes of old paper they will never use again?

Is it really only me that sees the unfairness and absurdity in this archaic paradigm? Why is the huge cost of the offsite storage of useless paper often overlooked when management is fighting to find cost savings? Why are people’s livelihoods sacrificed in deference to the need to maintain old, never-to-be-referenced-again, useless paper? Is it just because senior management is too busy with more important stuff like negotiating their next executive pay increase?

If you talk to the records manager you will be told that all that paper has to be maintained whatever the cost because of the Retention Schedule. In most cases, the Retention Schedule will be mentioned in the same way one talks about the Bible. That is, it is holy and sacrosanct and anyone who dares question it will be charged with heresy and subjected to torture and extreme deprivation in a rat infested, mouldy, dark and damp cell in the basement.

But, dig deeper and you will discover that the Retention Schedule is way too complex for the organization. You will also discover that no one really understands or can explain all the variations and that the application of it is at best, haphazard and irregular. This is when you will also discover that no one in records can actually justify why a huge percentage of those old, dusty and now irrelevant paper records are still costing you real hard cash each and every month. More importantly, they may have also cost you some of your most trusted and most valuable employees.

Isn’t it time someone senior actually looked at the money you are spending to manage mostly paper rubbish in very expensive containers?

I run a software company and I design and build an enterprise strength content management system called RecFind 6 which among other things, handles all the needs of physical records management.

This is fine if I have a big corporate or government customer because the cost is appropriate to the scale of the task at hand. However it isn’t fine when we receive lots of inquiries from much smaller organizations like small law forms that need a records management solution but only have a very small budget.

A very recent inquiry from a small but successful engineering company was also a problem because they didn’t have any IT infrastructure. They had no servers and used Google email. However, they still had a physical records management problem as well as an electronic document management problem but our solution was way outside of the ballpark.

Like any businessman I don’t like to see business walk away especially after we have spent valuable consultancy time helping the customer to understand the problem and define the need.

We have had a lot of similar inquiries lately and it has started me thinking about the need for a new type of product for small business, one that doesn’t require the overhead and expense of an enterprise-grade solution. It should also be one that doesn’t require in-house servers and a high overhead and maintenance cost.

Given our recent experience building a couple of iOS (for the iPhone and iPad) and Android (for any Android phone or tablet) apps I am of the opinion that any low cost but technically clever and easy-to-use solution should be based around a mobile device like a smart phone or tablet.

The lack of an in-house server wouldn’t be a problem because we would host the solution servers at a data centre in each country we operate in. Programming it wouldn’t be a problem because that is what we do and we already have a web services API as the foundation.

The only challenge I see is the need to get really creative about the functionality and the user interface. There is no way I can implement all the advanced functionality of the full RecFind 6 product on a mobile device and there is no way I can re-use the user interface from either the RecFind 6 smart-client or web-client. Even scaled down the user interface would be unsuitable for a mobile device; it needs a complete redesign. It isn’t just a matter of adapting to different form factors (screen sizes), it is about using the mobile device in the most appropriate way. It is about designing a product that leverages off the unique capabilities of a mobile device, not trying to force fit an application designed for Windows.

The good news is that there is some amazing technology now available for mobile devices that could easily be put to use for commercial business purposes even though a lot of it was designed for light weight applications and games. Three examples of very clever new software for mobile devices are Gimbal Context Aware, Titanium Mobile SDK and Vuforia Augmented Reality. But, these three development products are just the tip of the iceberg; there is literally a plethora of clever development tools and new products both in the market and coming to market in the near future.

As a developer, right now the Android platform looks to be my target. This is mainly because of the amount of software being developed for Android and because of the open nature of Android. It allows me to do far more than Apple allows me to do on its sandboxed iOS operating system.

Android also makes it far easier for me to distribute and support my solutions. I love iOS but Apple is just a little too anal and controlling to suit my needs. For example, I require free access to the file system and Apple doesn’t allow that. Nor does it give me the freedom I need to be able to attach devices my customers will need; no standard USB port is a huge pain for application developers.

I am sorry that I don’t have a solution for my smaller customers yet but I have made the decision to do the research and build some prototypes. RecFind 6 will be the back-end residing on a hosted server (in the ‘Cloud’) because it has a superset of the functionality required for my new mobile app. It is also the perfect development environment because the RecFind 6 Web Services SDK makes it easy for me to build apps for any mobile operating system.

So, I already have the backend functionality, the industrial-strength and scalable relational database and the Web Services API plus expertise in Android development using Eclipse and Java. Now all I have to do to produce my innovative new mobile app is find the most appropriate software and development platforms and then get creative.

It is the getting creative bit that is the real challenge. Wish me luck and watch this space.

When we were all learning about what used to be called Data Processing we also learned about the hierarchy or transformation of information. That is, “data to information to knowledge to wisdom.”

Unfortunately, as information management is part of what we call the Information Technology industry (IT) we as a group are never satisfied with simple self-explanatory terms. Because of this age-old flaw we continue to invent and hype new terms like Knowledge Management and Enterprise Content Management most of which are so vague and ill-defined as to be virtually meaningless but nevertheless, provide great scope for marketing hype and consultants’ income.

Because of the ongoing creation of new terminology and the accompanying acronyms we have managed to confuse almost everyone. Personally I have always favoured the term ‘information management’ because it tells it like it is and it needs little further explanation. In the parlance of the common man it is an “old un, but a good un.”

The thing I most disliked about the muddy knowledge management term was the claim that computers and software could produce knowledge. That may well come in the age of cyborgs and true artificial intelligence but I haven’t seen it yet. At best, computers and software produce information which human beings can convert to knowledge via a unique human cognitive process.

I am fortunate in that I have been designing and programming information management solutions for a very long time so I have witnessed first-hand the enormous improvements in technology and tools that have occurred over time. Basically this means I am able to design and build an infinitely better information management solution today that I could have twenty-nine years ago when I started this business.  For example, the current product RecFind 6 is a much better, more flexible, more feature rich and more scalable product than the previous K1 product and it in turn was an infinitely better product than the previous one called RecFind 5.

One of the main factors in them being better products than their predecessors is that each time we started afresh with the latest technology; we didn’t build on the old product, we discarded it completely and started anew. As a general rule of thumb I believe that software developers need to do this around a five year cycle. Going past the five year life cycle inevitably means you end up compromising the design because of the need to support old technology. You are carrying ‘baggage’ and it is synonymous with trying to run the marathon with a hundred pound (45 Kg) backpack.

I recently re-read an old 1995 white paper I wrote on the future of information management software which I titled “Document Management, Records Management, Image Management Workflow Management...What? – The I.D.E.A”. I realised after reading this old paper that it is only now that I am getting close to achieving my lofty ambitions as espoused in the early paper. It is only now that I have access to the technology required to achieve my design ambitions. In fact I now believe that despite its 1995 heritage this is a paper every aspiring information management solution creator should reference because we are all still trying to achieve the ideal ‘It Does Everything Application’ (but remember that it was my I.D.E.A. first).

Of course, if you are involved in software development then you realise that your job is never done. There are always new features to add and there are always new releases of products like Windows and SQL server to test and certify against and there are always new releases of development tools like Visual Studio and HTML5 to learn and start using.

You also realise that software development is probably the dumbest business in the world to be part of with the exception of drug development, the only other business I can think of which has a longer timeframe between beginning R&D and earning a dollar. We typically spend millions of dollars and two to three years to bring a brand new product to market. Luckily, we still have the existing product to sell and fund the R&D. Start-ups however, don’t have this option and must rely on mortgaging the house or generous friends and relatives or venture capital companies to fund the initial development cycle.

Whatever the source of funding, from my experience it takes a brave man or woman to enter into a process where the first few years are all cost and no revenue. You have to believe in your vision, your dream and you have to be prepared for hard times and compromises and failed partnerships. Software development is not for the faint hearted.

When I wrote that white paper on the I.D.E.A. (the It Does Every Thing Application or, my ‘idea’ or vision at that time) I really thought that I was going to build it in the next few years, I didn’t think it would take another fifteen years. Of course, I am now working on the next release of RecFind so it is actually more than fifteen years.

Happily, I now market RecFind 6 as an information management solution because information management is definitely back in vogue. Hopefully, everyone understands what it means. If they don’t, I guess that I will just have to write more white papers and Blogs.

It was a long time ago that we all realized that emails were about eighty-percent plus of business correspondence and little has changed today. Hopefully, we also realised that most of us weren’t managing emails and that this left a potentially lethal compliance and legal hole to plug.

I wrote some white papers on the need to manage emails back in 2004 and 2005 (“The need to manage emails” and “Six reasons why organizations don’t manage emails effectively”) and when I review them today they are just as relevant as they were eight years ago. That is to say, despite the plethora of email management tools now available most organizations I deal with still do not manage their emails effectively or completely.

As an recent example  we had an inquiry from the records manager at a US law firm who said she needed an email management solution but it had to be a ‘manual’ one where each worker would decide if and when and how to capture and save important emails into the records management system.  She went on to state emphatically that under no circumstances would she consider any kind of automatic email management solution.

This is the most common request we get. Luckily, we have several ways to capture and manage emails including a ‘manual’ one as requested as well as a fully automatic one called GEM that analyses all incoming and outgoing emails according to business rules and then automatically captures and classifies them within our electronic records and document management system RecFind 6.

We have to provide multiple options because that is what the market demands but it is common sense that any manual system cannot be a complete solution. That is, if you leave it up to the discretion of the operator to decide which emails to capture and how to capture them then you will inevitably have an incomplete and inconsistent solution.  Worse still, you will have no safeguards against fraudulent or dishonest behaviour.

Human beings are, by definition, ‘human’ and not perfect. We are by nature inconsistent in our behaviour on a day to day basis. We also forget things and sometimes make mistakes. We are not robots or cyborgs and consistent, perfect behaviour all controlled by Asimov’s three laws of robotics is a long, long way off for most of us.

This means dear reader that we cannot be trusted to always analyse, capture and classify emails in a one-hundred percent consistent manner. Our excuse is that we are in fact, just human.

The problem is exacerbated when we have hundreds or even thousands of inconsistent humans (your staff) all being relied upon to behave in an entirely uniform and consistent manner. It is in fact ludicrous to expect entirely uniform and consistent behaviour from your staff and it is bad practice and just plain foolish to roll out an email management system based on this false premise. It will never meet expectations. It will never plug all the compliance and legal holes and you will remain exposed no matter how much money you throw at the problem (e.g., training, training and re-training).

The only complete solution is one based on a fully-automatic model whereby all incoming and outgoing emails are analysed according to a set of business rules tailored to your specific needs. This is the only way to ensure that nothing gets missed. It is the only way to ensure that you are in fact plugging all the compliance and legal holes and removing exposure.

The fully automatic option is also the most cost-effective by a huge margin.

The manual approach requires each and every staff member to spend (waste?) valuable time every single day trying to decide which emails to capture and then actually going through the process time and time again. It also requires some form of a licence per employee or per desktop. This licence has a cost and it also has to be maintained, again at a cost.

The automatic approach doesn’t require the employee to do anything. It also doesn’t require a licence per employee or desktop because the software runs in the background talking directly to your email server. It is what we call a low cost, low impact and asynchronous solution.

The automatic model increases productivity and lowers costs. It therefore provides a complete and entirely consistent email management solution and at a significantly lower cost than any ‘manual’ model. So, why is it so hard to convince records managers to go with the fully automatic solution? This is the million dollar question though in some large organizations, it is a multi-million dollar question.

My response is that you should not be leaving this decision up to the records manager. Emails are the business of all parts of any organization; they don’t just ‘belong’ to the records management department. Emails are an important part of most business processes particularly those involving clients and suppliers and regulators. That is, the most sensitive parts of your business. The duty to manage emails transects all vertical boundaries within any organization. The need is there in accounts and marketing and engineering and in support and in every department.

The decision on how to manage emails should be taken by the CEO or at the very least, the CIO with full cognizance of the risks to the enterprise of not managing emails in a one-hundred percent consistent and complete manner.

In the end email management isn’t in fact about email management, it is about risk management. If you don’t understand that and if you don’t make the necessary decisions at the top of your organization you are bound to suffer the consequences in the future.

Are you going to wait for the first law suit or punitive fine before taking action?

Have you ever had to remove files from shelving or cabinets and reallocate them to other spaces because a drawer or shelf is packed tight? Then had to do it again and again?

One of my favourite records managers used to call this the “Squishing” problem.

The squishing problem is inevitable if you start to load files from the beginning of any physical filing system, be it shelving or cabinets and unload file files from random locations as the retention schedule dictates. If you create and file parts (a new folder called part 2, part 3, etc., when the original file folder is full) then the problem is exacerbated. You may well spend a large part of your working life shuffling file folders from location to location; a frustrating and worthless, thankless task. You also get to inhale a lot of toxic paper dust and mites which is not a good thing.

You may not be aware of it but there is a very simple algorithm you can utilize to make sure the squishing problem never happens to you. It is usually referred to as the ‘Terminal Digit’ file numbering system but you may call it whatever you like. The name isn’t important but the operation is.

Importantly, you don’t need to change your file numbering system other than by adding on additional numbers to the end. These additional numbers are the terminal digits.

The number of terminal digits you need depends upon how many file folders you have to manage. Here is a simple guideline:

·         One terminal Digit (0 to 9) = one thousand files

·         Two Terminal Digits (00 to 99) = ten thousand Files

·         Three Terminal Digits (000 to 999) = greater than ten thousand files

Obviously, you also have to have the filing space and appropriate facilities available (e.g., boxes, bays, etc.,) to hold the required number of files for each terminal.

It is called the Terminal Digit system because you first have to separate your available filing space into a number of regular ‘terminals’. Each terminal is identified by a number, e.g., 0, 1, 2, 09, 23, 112, 999, etc.

The new terminal digit is additional and separate from your normal file number. It determines which terminal a file will be stored in. Let’s say your normal file number is of the format YYYY/SSSSSS. That is, the current year plus an automatically incrementing auto number like 2012/000189 then 2012/000190, etc. If we use two terminal digits and divide your available filing space into one hundred terminals (think of it as 100 equally sized filing slots or bays numbered 00 to 99) then your new file number format is YYYY/SSSSSS-99. The two generated file numbers above may now look like 2012/000189-00 and 2012/000190-01.

File folder 2012/000189-00 is filed in terminal number 00 and 2012/000190-01 is filled in terminal number 01. In a nutshell, what we are doing is distributing files evenly across all available filing space. We are not starting at terminal 00 and filling it up and then moving on to terminal 01, then terminal 02 when 01 is full etc. Finding files is even easier because the first part of the file number you look at is the terminal digit. If a file number ends in 89 it will be in terminal 89 in file number order.

The other good news is that when we unload files from the shelves say at end of life or at the point in the lifecycle when they need to sent offsite we will also unload files evenly across all available filing space. If the terminals are actually big enough and if you have calculated everything correctly you should never again suffer from the ‘squishing’ problem and you should never again have to ingest paper dust and mites when tediously shuffling files from location to location.

Obviously, there is a little more to this than sticking a couple of digits on the end of your file number. I assume you are using a computerised records management system so changes have to be made or configured to correctly calculate the now extended file number (including the new terminal digit) and your colour file labels will need to be changed to show the terminal digit in a prominent position.

There is also the question of what to do with your existing squished file store. Ideally you would start from scratch with your new numbering systems and terminals and wait for the old system to disappear as the files age and disappear offsite to Grace or Iron Mountain. That probably won’t be possible so you will have to make decisions based on available resources and budget and come up with the best compromise.

I can’t prove it but I suspect that the terminal digit system has been around since people began filing stuff. It is an elegantly simple solution to an annoying and frustrating problem and involves nothing more complicated than simple arithmetic.

The surprise is that so few organizations actually use it. In twenty-five plus years in this business I don’t think I have seen it in use at more than one to two-percent of the customers I have visited. I have talked about it and recommended it often but the solution seems to end up in the too-hard basket; a shame really, especially for the records management staff charged with the constant shuffling of paper files.

It may be that you have a better solution but just in case you don’t, please humour me and have another look at the terminal digit filing solution. It may just save you an enormous amount of wasted time and make your long-suffering records staff a lot happier and a lot healthier.

I have written about this many times before (see links below) but our customers continue to ask for advice, usually when being ‘told’ by IT that they will have to use SharePoint as their records management solution.

http://www.knowledgeonecorp.com/news/pdfs/IntegratingWithSharePoint.pdf

http://www.knowledgeonecorp.com/news/pdfs/SharePoint%20-%20A%20Primer.pdf

In the past I have treated the subject softly and leaned over backwards to be kind to SharePoint, after all, who am I to argue with mighty Microsoft? Now however, I am just going to tell it how it is.

• Out of the box RecFind 6 is an infinitely better and lower cost and faster to roll out records management solution than SharePoint 2010.
• You can easily and quickly configure RecFind 6 to meet one hundred-percent of your records management requirements. No matter how much time and money you throw at SharePoint 2010 you will never be able to meet one hundred-percent of your records management requirements.
• Whereas the initial licensing costs of SharePoint 2010 may appear to make it a better financial proposition than RecFind 6, once you start pouring in the money required to get SharePoint to do what RecFind 6 does out of the box the situation reverses very quickly. By the time you finish paying your SharePoint consultants (and you probably never will) you will end up paying at least ten times what you would have paid for RecFind 6.
• Worse, whereas Knowledgeone Corporation does all the maintenance and adds all the new features to RecFind 6 as part of your annual maintenance (ASU),  with SharePoint you have to design, implement, test and fund all the maintenance and improvements to your SharePoint system. This means that the ongoing costs are also around ten times what it would cost to maintain an equivalent RecFind 6 system.

It is important to note that this is just not my opinion. As an example, please refer to the advice given to state government agencies by NSW State Records:

http://futureproof.records.nsw.gov.au/initial-advice-on-implementing-recordkeeping-requirements-in-sharepoint-2010/

Allow me to summarize:

• SharePoint 2010 is a good collaboration & intranet solution but will not apply good records management functionality out of the box.
• It will take a significant investment of time, money and strategy to build an effective EDRMS with SharePoint 2010.
• While licence costs for SharePoint may be relatively inexpensive, the complexity and cost of designing, developing, implementing and maintaining a SharePoint 2010 EDRMS is considerable and needs to be factored into the decision to implement EDRMS functionality with SharePoint.
• SharePoint 2010 is not compliant to records management standards including with reference to:
• Difficulties in capturing email;
• Lack of native security classification and access control; plus
• An inability to manage hybrid records (i.e. both electronic & hard copy records).
• As SharePoint generally operates as a series of team sites, the complexity & costs of design, development, implementation and on-going maintenance should reflect the fact that each team site will need to be specifically implemented to meet the particular recordkeeping requirements of each business area.
• Without proper design & implementation a SharePoint EDRMS implementation will become another sprawling, uncontrolled network or shared drive environment, with content existing everywhere. SharePoint’s native structure is much like a website, where it is possible to implement as many specific sites for different teams and projects or business areas as your organisation requires. Without strong records management frameworks, recordkeeping can quickly scale out of control in this kind of environment.

If your main interest is physical records management then don’t even begin to consider SharePoint because it simply cannot do it.

If your main interest is email management then SharePoint also does not have the required functionality.

However, RecFind 6:

1. Delivers all of the EDRMS functionality a customer will every need out of the box.
2. Is fully compliant to all known records management standards (e.g. has achieved full compliance with all of the latest VERS standards).
3. Has comprehensive out of the box capabilities to manage hybrid records (electronic and / & hard copy records).
4. Has the administration application called the DRM that allows the customer to customize RecFind 6 and change almost anything including the data model and any business process, easily & quickly, without source code changes, whilst remaining on the standard product.
5. Has a SharePoint 2010 integration module so that a customer can take advantage of the good collaboration & intranet capabilities of SharePoint and the best-in-class EDRMS functionality of RecFind 6 within the one integrated environment.

So there we have it, no more Mr nice guy. As a records management solution RecFind 6 blows SharePoint out of the water. It costs less, is easier and faster to roll out and has infinitely more RM functionality in the standard product than you will ever be able to develop in SharePoint.

Now I feel much better.