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With virtually all business records created electronically – only a few needing to be reduced to physical form -- organizations are struggling with how to address the question of whether their electronically stored information (ESI) is reliable and accurate.  ANSI has adopted Standard 25 to assist all types of organizations, whether private, non-profit or public sector in assessing whether the environment in which the ESI is maintained is trustworthy.

ANSI/AIIM 25 states that any assessment must take a comprehensive look at the environment by reviewing the policies and procedures – from retention schedules to discovery response plans to digital signature policies – and evaluating how all members of the organization are following them.  In addition, there must be a review of the security models and data storage. Organizations must provide safe and secure storage and information access, as well as have a mechanism in place to determine whether the solution is actually meeting the needs of the organization.  Any storage solution must be "auditable" with reproducible results and there must be a method of independently verifying that the information is safe and secure. 

Because organizations have a myriad of options for designing their systems and environments to capture the ESI, development of an ANSI standard to accompany AIIM and ISO best practices for implementing Electronic Content Management (ECM) systems was necessary, according to Robert M. Blatt, President of EID, Inc., and chair of the ANSI/AIIM C27 – Document Management Standardization Committee responsible for drafting the standard.

“In the past few years we have seen an increase in the number of organizations questioning how they can demonstrate that the information they have stored in their ECM systems is true and accurate,” said Blatt.  “There are lots of variations in how each organization implements a content management system, so ANSI 25 provides general standards on how to go about conducting the assessment in order to match the variety you find in each ESI environment.”

Organizations trying to demonstrate the trustworthiness and reliability of their information will now have a standard against which to show that the records or documents were stored in trusted ECM systems, thus giving assurance as to the reliability and accuracy of the information.

A copy of ANSI/AIIM 25: 2012, Assessing Trusted Systems for Compliance with Industry Standards and Best Practices may be purchased through AIIM’s website at http://www.aiim.org/Research-and-Publications/Standards/Catalog/3123