A records-management pioneer shares advice about implementing best practices. See the first article on Health Care here.

In late 2006, when a host of new “e-discovery” rules went into effect, companies in all market segments began the sometimes slow process of shoring up how they manage, retain and retrieve electronic information, including e-mails. On top of existing and complicated information-management regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, e-discovery can seem like a daunting burden for many businesses.

The flip side is that these challenges create additional opportunities for solution providers to sell multifunction products (MFPs) as a foundation for enterprise applications that secure and organize crucial information.

But to fully capitalize on this area, solution providers will need to continually develop their expertise, not only as it applies to hardware and software recommendations, but also for implementation of best practices.

Northeast Utilities, a large East Coast provider of power, is gathering some useful implementation insights as it continues to roll out a companywide records-management solution that it launched in response to the latest e-discovery laws. For solution providers, the utility’s lessons offer a starting point for formulating their own document-management strategies.

Spurred to Act
Although e-discovery rules prompted the utility to set an aggressive deadline for its new electronic records-management system, compliance wasn’t the only motivation. It also recognized the chance to add business-process efficiencies by helping staff members locate important information more quickly, says Maureen Bazan, the utility’s record management program manager, who presented her findings at a recent industry conference.

But first, Northeast had to understand the scope of its project. An indication of how big the project would be came after an assessment of its e-mail resources. The utility found itself managing 6,000 Lotus Notes e-mail accounts and 4,000 Notes Application databases. Approximately 125,000 e-mails flowed through the system each week. In addition to e-mail, the organization also identified 14 terabytes of data stored on its file system, as well as about 38,000 boxes of hard-copy records.

To manage this growing volume, Northeast outlined a solution that now includes a records repository, tools for easily tagging new e-mails and files as records, and a records manager that incorporates the organization’s information-handling rules and retention policies.

Concrete Advice
Now in the second phase of a three-phase, department-by-department implementation, Northeast has already identified some important best practices. “Success begins with an effective, collaborative cross-functional team,” Bazan says. “You need support from business, legal and IT: Business owns the records; legal is obligated to discover and preserve the records; and IT holds and stores the records,” she explains.

To solidify business support, the records-managing project team met regularly with 16 vice presidents to discuss the role of each group and what kinds of records each creates. “[These discussions] took a lot of time to organize, but they delivered the best value of the entire project,” Bazan says. Because the vice presidents understood the goals of the project, they were able to communicate its importance to subordinates. “We not only quickly identified records, but [the talks] also spurred process improvements,” she says.

In addition to executive support, other success factors included forming an effective, cross-departmental steering committee, forging a strong partnership between the legal and IT departments, prioritizing how the solution would be rolled out across the company, and remaining flexible about balancing out-of-the-box and customized technology components, Bazan adds.