Records and Information Governance Program

A company’s Records and Information Governance Program directly impacts relationships with constituents, employees, suppliers, national and other local governments, and touches on other stakeholders in a global environment. Constituents and outside agencies expect fast response times in problem resolution which requires an employee to find the right record at the right time. Information needs to be accessible and complete with the goal of improving services over time. Building on the concept, best in class information governance provides the framework to also report to stakeholders, government regulatory agencies and to the public in an accurate and expeditious manner. 

Records and Information Governance Program maintenance is tedious and more often than not, is on the back burner in most organizations. 

Western recognizes that each organization has a unique set of records and information management challenges. The first challenge is to define a Program and its business rules and processes. The second is to convey to employees that each is obligated to manage the organization’s business records in accordance with national, state and local regulations while protecting confidential and trade-secret information. The second is to make it easy for employees to comply. . Since the records and information belong to the organization, and not the employee, a systematic process to capture the records and information, index and manage appropriately needs to be put in place. 

The answer: Robotic Process Automation 

Records management as it is currently practiced essentially starts when an employee creates or receives a document. Management of business records is left to the individual without much business oversight; there is no records management, which is not a best practice as described in ARMA’s Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles (The Principles). It is also not in keeping with the ANSI/AIIM Standard 25:2012 for Trusted Systems or the International Organization of Standardization’s (ISO) standards 15489, 30300 or 13007. This leaves the organization at risk of not being able to provide requested electronic records held by an employee on a C-drive or in an email inbox without extensive and expensive IT effort. These rules, along with a retention schedule which defines what should be done with a particular record type, mean that a robot can be created to ensure the rules are met, and, can be proven to have been met. 

The technology, like all technology after the early adopters have proven its usefulness, has come down in price. The ROI is the equivalent of less than one responsive document search in an unmanaged environment of shared drives and email archives.