Records Management: Policies and Procedures

From the translator. The previous publication , devoted to the issues of preservation of superfluous information, caused a very lively discussion among readers. The results of the voting for the post (14 - for and 12 - against) indicate that the audience was divided into two opposing camps. Some argue that it is much better and safer to save any information in electronic form. Others - that for electronic documentation certain periods of storage should also be established, after which it can be destroyed after the examination of the value of the document. Both are right in their own way.

Indeed, if we are talking about the archives of organizations, the loss of valuable information can entail serious time and financial costs. The storage periods of documents of enterprises and organizations are regulated both by external (for example, legislative) and internal corporate norms. At the same time, not a single regulatory document says anything about the criteria for the value and importance of information. Documents that, for one reason or another, are considered valuable, in some organizations may well be stored beyond the established deadlines.

Most of the existing rules and regulations of archival storage "sharpened" under paper documents; they often fall very heavily on the realities of the digital age. For example, in our country, documents relating to the personal files of employees of an organization should be kept for 75 years. However, can this requirement be considered feasible for electronic documents? Over the course of 75 years, media and formats will inevitably become obsolete (this is a rather complicated topic that deserves separate discussion), which can also lead to the loss of valuable information. How to solve this problem?
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We have repeatedly faced with this problem, engaged in the industrial scanning of documents. The average project size (including “raw” files from scanners) is hundreds of gigabytes, and sometimes terabytes. At the end of the project and signing the certificate of completion, we have the full right to delete this data - and we will be absolutely right: if all the terms of the contract have expired, we are not obliged to store them. But it often happens that a client who has lost discs with scanned materials asks us to provide the files again. Faced several times with a similar situation, we decided: to store all materials for each project for one year from the date of its completion.

Another example relates to almost all companies engaged in foreign economic activity. Violation of the deadlines for the submission of forms for accounting and reporting on currency transactions entails the initiation of an administrative violation case and is considered in Rosfinnadzor. One of the facts confirming that the violation occurred through no fault of your company will be correspondence including e-mail with your counterparty. Considering that a person may be brought to administrative responsibility no later than one year from the day the administrative offense was committed, it is necessary to keep all corporate e-mail for at least a year.

Naturally, the legislation often does not keep pace with the development of information technologies and in the activities of companies it is necessary to be guided by the realities of business and practical logic.

We bring to the attention of the audience a translation of the article by Doculabs Rich Medina, an expert on the issue of developing policies and procedures in the field of records management. We hope that this publication will clarify the issues already raised in the previous discussion and hope that our readers will share their own experience in organizing the storage of electronic documents.



The implementation of records management systems is always associated with the work of an organizational and methodological nature, in particular with the work on creating policies and procedures. Without such work, it is hardly possible to talk about the effective use of the ECM system. With a well-designed system of policies and procedures. ECM-system can work quite well even with insufficient budget.

What is the problem?

In most cases, employees of organizations have nothing against a clear adherence to policies and procedures, but in the process of work they have to face the following problems:

• insufficient attention to policies and procedures (including in areas in which the use of electronic records plays an important role)
• lack of organization of communication on policies and procedures
• lack of understanding of policies and procedures by staff, which in most cases is due to the two reasons mentioned above
• a situation in which norms written on paper cannot be followed in practice

How to solve a problem?

1. Clarify the hierarchy of goals for which you create a system of policies and procedures. In many organizations, one is confronted with a misunderstanding of the real significance for business activity of records management systems, as well as of relevant policies. As a result, there is no clear vision of goals, which, in turn, can lead to conflict situations. Failure of a clearly formulated goal may cause additional financial costs, as well as significantly reduce productivity. When setting goals, it is necessary to set priorities: you need to start with the primary, most important goals. In our opinion, the main objectives of records management are as follows:

• ensure that stored documentation complies with legal regulations
• to reduce the financial costs of bringing the documentation in compliance with existing requirements
• ensure that the organization’s mission record management strategies and policies are consistent;
  facilitate the rapid implementation of new initiatives
• improve organization performance

2. Clearly define the subject area . All information available in the organization can be divided into three parts:

• all information
• information currently in use
• information received status record

One of the important goals of implementing records management systems is to ensure the possibility of a clear classification of all information of the organization. In practice, very few organizations classify available information.

One possible approach to the classification issue is to evaluate information in terms of significance, risk, and management capabilities. There is information of exceptional value in terms of all three named parameters - these are, as a rule, the most important documents of the organization; from the point of view of records management, working with them causes no problems. The importance of other documents from the point of view of these three parameters is extremely low: such documents are often littered with corporate servers, hard drives of work computers and email boxes. The main part of the information assets of the organization in terms of risk is of uncertain value in terms of significance, risk and management capabilities. Very many documents from the main array can be transferred to the category of records. When information assets of an organization are ranked by significance and degree of risk, the development of appropriate policies and procedures is greatly simplified.
Do not adhere to too narrow an understanding and information of corporate information only to documents that have the status of records.
At the same time, one should not adhere to too broad an understanding and give the status of a record to each document. Another common mistake is to apply the same approach to different documents (with different status, content, structure, etc.)

Competent position is to not be inclined to extremes and adequately evaluate and rank all the available information. The following types of documents can be distinguished:

• documents that currently have the status of records and entered into the organization's ECM system
• documents that do not receive the status of records, but with great value (they must be entered into the corporate ECM-system, and their status must be reviewed)
• documents that do not have status records, but are managed using an ECM system
• documents that do not have the status of records that are stored and processed using specialized software (for example, CAD programs)
• documents stored on corporate hard drives. As a rule, they have no special value.

3. Develop policies and procedures that have a clear and logical structure . Record management policies must be consistent with the objectives of record management and the overall objectives of the organization. It is necessary that any policy contributes primarily to the achievement of goals. Politicians, in turn, are associated with procedures under which specific actions are carried out. Performing a procedure by definition is following its regulatory policy.