Today I want to write about the second step in the process of structured records management, the classification of structured records.

Structured business applications are built to perform consistent tasks as part of well defined day-to-day business processes. This, combined with the predictable nature of the structured data that they use, makes it possible to automate the classification of the structured records we extract from them.

In my last post I talked about how the database administrator and the records manager work together to define the model and extraction rules for the creation of structured records. The classification step falls into the same design time activities. It needs to be done once, and after that will be applied to every structured records transfer of the same type automatically.

When I talk about classification, I talk about assigning a variety of metadata values, which will be created as descriptive and management metadata in the target records management system to enable retention management, security and access management, as well as high accuracy searching by metadata tags. The classification also allows you to bring structured records into context with unstructured records.

Our structured records management solution allows you to access the records management business classification directly from within the design environment, so that you can browse it and navigate to select the correct branch for your structured records definition.  Other metadata fields are imported into the designer from a central configuration area, where they are mapped to the fields in the records management repository. For any metadata field you can decide whether you want to define a "static" value or whether you want to derive the value from the structured record itself at run-time. You can either read data values into the field or generate values based on a combination of data and rules. For example the base date for the record retention could be read from the structured data directly or it could be calculated based in a rule, for example based on a country code in support of country specific retention rules.

All of this flexibility allows you to create a pre-defined metadata profile that allows you to transfer structured records in a completely automated fashion and still get accurate, dynamically created metadata describing them.

I look forward to meeting you again in my next post, whjen I will talk about the extraction of records from the source system and their ingestion into the records management environment.