Several members of AIIM's Emerging Technology Advisory Group (EmTAG) recently responded to a request to comment on the trends, issues and opportunities in Enterprise Records Management that they have observed lately. Below is a synthesis of that discussion.
RM Business Issues
What happened to the “E” in Enterprise Records Management (ERM)? Business, operational and regulatory pressures are increasing on organizations. However, the ERM vendors and the technologies have not yet caught up with the requirements for an ERM solution or a set of services that manages all of the records of an enterprise in an integrated manner. This is evident from the significant challenges faced by organizations in managing both legacy and current information and records even after implementing large scale ERM solutions. Have companies thrown in the towel on ERM when Enterprise means that records need to be spread across multiple repositories? Or is this simply too big a problem to tackle given the unique nature of each repository? Are we moving towards an environment where Enterprise that means a master Records Retention Schedule links to some repositories and not others? How many companies are achieving success with ERM? There are not a lot of visible success stories.
Distinguishing between Records Disposition Processing and Business Processing is a challenge. Some companies believe that a solid retention schedule and disposition process provides the necessary framework for a full records management program. It does not. There is still a need to associate and, where possible, automate key business process events that drive the disposition of records. For example, the termination of an employee usually requires someone to go into an HR system or module and change the status of the employee to terminated. However, rarely is there an automated trigger that initiates the disposition process for all documents in all repositories (file systems, SharePoint, traditional ECM, etc), based on this event.
EDiscovery
Companies are realizing that the high cost of e-discovery requests is a direct result of the lack of executive oversight on records management programs, policies and implementations. Some organizations have revitalized their records management programs, and have moved them away from IT and into operational and compliance functions. Companies are refocusing both budget and resources towards streamlined compliance, and are focusing on “best of breed” policies and procedures and better supervision of employee behavior and organizational culture. Simply providing once-a-year-web-based compliance training is not enough. Additionally, solution providers in the e-discovery marketplace are re-emphasizing that organizations get a handle on corporate data from the ground up, thus providing further incentives for action.
Vendors
The fragmented nature of the ERM vendor landscape has provided good opportunities for smaller vendors and niche service providers to make inroads into the ERM market that was once controlled by a small number of ECM Suite providers. To prosper, the ECM Suite vendors must adapt quickly, before these smaller players capture more market share. We are not seeing an organizational desire for the traditional “one ECM Suite fits all requirements” model. The advent of SharePoint has convinced many organizations that we will be dealing with multiple repositories for the foreseeable future. Also, when it comes to ERM initiatives, many organizations are starting with pilots and going slow. This does not fit into the big budget, multi-year, enterprise-wide ECM Suite implementation model.
Email RM
As Exchange 2010 is adopted in organizations, its inability to be integrated with SharePoint 2010 RM remains a key gap. Email has been one of the most difficult issues for records managers to address, and many practitioners were hoping that a product-level integration between Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 would make this issue easier to address. Organizations continue to struggle with how best to manage email messages as records.
Auto-classification
Sophisticated crawling technologies, such as the EMC’s Kazeon and StoredIQ appliances, as well as software tools such as Active Navigation and Digital Reef, are enabling organizations to crawl through repositories to identify potential records better than ever. As large organizations are replacing their legacy share drive farms via migration to repositories of record, these tools are reducing the classification burden involved with the migration.
SharePoint 2010 RM
There is substantial interest in the implementation of SharePoint to formally manage information and records. SharePoint 2010 has been released, and organizations large and small are experimenting with its new RM functionality. While it contains many advances and is architecturally much more complete than MOSS 2007 RM, there are still critical limitations. Some of these are structural and some are issues that a new product will contain. We are seeing trend away from a SharePoint - “it’s a dumping ground for stuff” - mindset to more of a “let’s figure out the best use of SharePoint” mindset. This has meant that both technology vendors and service providers not just implementing a “technology product”, but are solving the unique operational and compliance problems facing the organization.
New products, such as the HP Tower 7 and the EMC EDRSMS Connectors, have enabled the records management capabilities of proven enterprise management products to be combined with SharePoint using External Blob Storage (EBS) or Remote Blob Storage (RBS) connectors. These products take very different approaches to both integration and records management. HP maps attributes between a SharePoint site and an HP Tower repository of record, while the EMC connector sends the entire SharePoint property bag to Documentum for records management in Retention Policy Services folders. Laser Fiche and Open Text offer variations on these approaches for RM that is integrated with SharePoint.
Physical Records Management is not well-supported in either SharePoint 2007 or 2010 without customizations or 3rd party products, such as FileTrail. Specific challenges include limitations with bar coding and space planning and not being able to support list items and document items in the same list. This is an opportunity for ISV’s.
Is the Concept of ERM Dead?
In a provocative recent post, EmTAG member Dan Elam asks whether ECM is dead, especially as it has been traditionally seen. This has implications for the boundaries of ERM also. This remains a vibrant and fast-evolving area!
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