I started my professional life when computers were big machines that filled rooms and only large corporations could afford them. In smaller businesses many of the administrative tasks, such as accounting, keeping customer registers, product catalogs, managing personnel, leave control, payroll etc. were done on paper in big ledgers.  These ledgers were managed as records with very well defined access controls and retention schedules.

With the advent of personal computing, or affordable computing, most of these well defined administrative processes started to use specialized applications that stored the data in some form of database. The focus of these applications was the day-to-day business process and the focus of the underlying databases was the storage, linking, and retrieval of the data, as a service to the applications. Neither the application nor the database technology looked at the requirements of records management.

At the same time, records management systems moved from index card systems to computerized metadata catalogs, and pretty soon moved on to also capture electronic records directly from users' desktops. The focus of electronic records management was on unstructured documents, which proved to be a real nightmare to manage in environments where information could be created by anyone, virtually anywhere and anytime. The information of the structured line of business application was seemingly managed - at least it had a recognizable structure and was stored in a controlled environment.

It is only now, when e-discovery and freedom of information legislation includes all electronically stored information (ESI), that businesses start to realize that very large parts of their ESI resides in structured databases and is not managed as business records.

In a post a couple of months ago I wrote about how some of our HP TRIM customers use metadata only records to at least recognize the existence of records in structured systems within the records management environment; the next step is now to talk about how to start taking control of the structured records at a more detailed level.

The combination of HP Information Management's Database Archiving and HP TRIM technologies makes it possible to manage structured records right from their definition in the source system to their management and destruction as part of TRIM's classification and retention policies.  This allows us to bring back into the fold of records management all that information that somehow got overlooked during the rapid change from paper to electronic environments.  Stay tuned for more...