Search results matching tag 'Document and Records Management'

DoD 5015.2 Version 3 includes Freedom of Information and Data Protection process management

uraas — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:19:00 GMT

Three of my colleagues just returned from the certification testing of TRIM against the latest version of the DoD 5015.2 standard, and once again TRIM has been certified against all chapters, which gives us an unbroken certification since the standard exists. This time around the certification was interesting because version 3 of the standard introduces some new functional modules including Web client, XML import and export, and the new FOI and DP chapters.

The FOI and DP chapters contain requirements to enable the processing of Freedom of Information and Data Protection requests. As such they move into a new field of business process management, albeit records related. The document and workflow management features of TRIM, as well as the reporting module came in handy. Naturally, all of this TRIM functionality can also be used for other document automation processes, such as application processing, complaints handling, contract management etc. From that point of view I think that certification against these chapters is valuable not just for records managers, but for any business manager who wants to streamline document processes with the added benefit of having the documents managed as records at the same time, without any additional effort.

Once again it leads me to make the point that records management needs to be an integral part of all processes, rather than being looked at as a separate discipline that can be added "after the fact". (I know, I keep going on about this, but it is important...)

Structured Records Management - Taking control of the structured data

uraas — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:16:00 GMT

In my last post I spoke about how the transfer of structured data from the source system into the records management system works. Now that we have covered this step, lets look at some of the special features that you want to manage structured data as records.

Like any other record, you want to be able to preserve the authenticity, reliability, integrity and usability of the data. The authenticity is maintained by the system storing an audit trail of the whole transfer process and any subsequent actions taken on the records. The reliability is based on the collaboration of application owners and records managers in the definition and classification of the structured records model, which means that the transferred data is based on a design by people who know all the facts about its source and usage.

That leaves me to elaborate a bit more about the integrity and usability.

The structured records get transferred into the records management environment as XML files. Each transfer batch is a self contained group, consisting of a number of XML files that contain the data and a summary XML file that contains a detailed description of what the data files contain. To be able to use the data and the summary file in future, each of them is described by a XML schema definition. All of these files together form a single package and the records management rules are applied at the package level, meaning that the same security and retention rules apply to all files of a single transfer. The integrity of the individual files can be proved at any stage based on hash comparison technology between the summary and the data files.

Usability means that the structured data is not lost once it resides in the records management environment. Text indexing can be used to provide searching across the contents of the XML files to find batches that include data pertinent to a particular circumstance, e.g. all batches that contain customer number XYZ or order number 123. This is the kind of full text searching that people use across all machine readable formats as part of early searches in the e-discovery or freedom of information processes. However, structured records should also be available to other methods of searching, e.g. for reporting engines. Having the data in XML format with a full schema description allows us to use our Record Query Server to create an ODBC data source pointing to the XML files, which can then be used by a whole variety of SQL query tools - this is a distinct advantage that you get from storing structured records as XML data, rather than as flat text file or PDF formatted report output. If the original application still exists, and its algorithms are desirable in the analysis of the data, the records management system provides a re-load function to send the XML based data back to the original source database schema.

In all our design of HP TRIM functionality we pay attention to the characteristics of records as prescribed by ISO 15489: authenticity, reliability, integrity and usability, and as you can see, structured records management is no exception. By adhering to this principle we are able to create a truly unified records management environment, encompassing all formats of information, physical, electronic, unstructured and structured, meaning that you can apply a single set of consistent records management policies across all your enterprise content.

Structured Records Management - Transferring the records

uraas — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:17:00 GMT

Once you have defined what the records that you extract from your structured business application look like and how they are classified in the target records management system, you are ready to start transferring them.

There are different things to consider depending on what type of transfer you are performing. If you are transferring the records as a one-off exercise, for example because you want to retire the application that contains them, you will want to perform a "move". If you are transferring the records as part of an ongoing structured records management regime, it is possible that you want to "copy" them into the records management system and defer the deletion to a later point in time. This deferred deletion option allows you to collect records as soon as they conform with the selection criteria, but still keep a copy in the originating system for fast access. If you implement a deferred delete policy you want to make sure that the records management system can initiate the deferred delete based on predefined or rules-based dates, as well as implementing a feature that ensures that the data in the source system is never retained for any longer than the controlled records. When records are destroyed in accordance with their retention schedule, the system must also initiate the deferred deletion of the original data.

Whatever approach the transfer process takes, you want to make sure that you have an audit trail that covers the selection and extraction from the source application and the creation of the records in the target records management system. Ideally the whole process uses digital signatures and hash algorithms to ensure the integrity of the transfer end to end. This allows you to provide an unbroken chain of custody for your structured records.

Once your transfer is complete and the structured records are stored and classified in your records management system, they will be managed in accordance with your corporate records management policy and in context with all the unstructured records that you capture from other systems or users' desktops. I will tell you about some additional features that can be useful particularly for structured records management in a later post...

Structured Records Management - Classifying the records

uraas — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:40:00 GMT

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.

What is Electronic Records Management?

pateiten — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:18:00 GMT

By Claudia Currie

AIIM – the Association for Information and Image Management - is the leading non-profit organization focused on helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes. They recently released a presentation which provides you with an overview of Electronic Records Management (ERM). The slides are from the AIIM ERM Certificate Program covering technologies and global best practices for managing electronic records.

Click here to download it.

Structured Records Management - Defining what constitutes a record

uraas — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:22:00 GMT

After last weeks overview of the structured records management process, I want to start giving you some details of what each step in the process involves, beginning with the definition step.

Records stored in relational databases, as the name suggests, are made up from individual data items stored in multiple tables, linked to each other using relational links. This means that not every record is a neat package that is redundantly stored with clear boundaries. Some data items are shared between many records, others are uniquely stored for each record.

If you want to extract and store the data as long term records without reliance on the source application to maintain their usability, you need to extract it in a format that allows you to execute SQL queries across the data at any point in future. You also need to model the records so that they include all the data required to represent a complete and accurate picture of the data as it was at the time of extracting the record.

Structured records management is a discipline that brings together database administrators and records managers. In our solution we use definition tool that allows graphical browsing and modeling of the data structures to define the records. This allows the database administrator to visualize the data in a way that is easily understandable to people without specialist RDBMS knowledge, such as many records manager.

While you are modeling the data you also want to be able to create rules that you can use to select which records to extract from the system at what point. These may be selection rules such as "All fulfilled orders" or exclusion rules such as "Product is not recalled". This is where the records manager can provide valuable input as to what constitutes a record. Our definition tool shows you what data is available to build the rules upon and allows you to formulate them right from within the data model.

Once you have defined the data model for the structured records and the rules that you want to use in their creation, you are ready to move to the next step in the process, the classification of the records.

To be continued....

Compliance concerns resulting from cross-border litigation

pateiten — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:13:00 GMT

By Patrick Eitenbichler

On April 7th, the Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal published a great article written by Brandon Cook, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Clearwell Systems.

Brandon describes how the increasing number of business transactions across borders leads to more litigation, government inquirires, and compliance audits spanning international boundaries. Using a number of real-life examples, he shows the implications and then provides recommendations on how to get prepared for cross-border e-discovery.

Take a read: "Why Cross-Border Litigation is a Compliance Concern"

Records management in US Federal Government Agencies

pateiten — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:06:00 GMT

By Noel Rath

Are you interested in how different records management systems have been adopted in U.S. Government Federal agencies? Would you like to see how easy they were to deploy and how easy it was for users to use these new systems?

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration has published a report from their ‘Continuing Study of Federal Agency Recordkeeping Technologies 2008’ study. The agencies studied were:

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Navy
U.S. Department of the Treasury
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)

This report is very informative and publically available at http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/resources/recordkeeping-tech-2008.pdf .

Structured Records Management - from data to record

uraas — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:39:00 GMT

In my last post I started on the subject of Structured Records Management, an area of records management that is re-gaining a lot of relevance because ALL electronically stored information is discoverable in e-Discovery and FOIA, not just unstructured documents.

In this and some subsequent posts I would like to introduce some of the concepts involved in structured records management. To start with, let's have a look at the steps involved to turn data in structured applications into records managed according to corporate policy:

1. Definition - this step allows us to identify and model the records in the source system

2. Classification - this step allows us to model some descriptive metadata around the records to apply our records management context

3. Extraction - this step allows us to extract records from the source system, based on the modeling done previously

4. Ingestion - this step brings the structured records under the control of the corporate records management environment

5. Management - this step allows us to access, retrieve, query, verify, the structured data under the control of the records management environment

6. Dispose - this step allows us to manage the retention and legal holds of structured data under the control of the records management environment

As I mentioned before, in HP IM we have created a solution that covers all the steps listed above, using our Database Archiving and TRIM products. It is a truly exciting project to be working on! Throughout the process I was amazed how well the two products complement each other. I will let you know more about some of the details for each step in follow-up posts...

What happened to all the structured data we used to manage as records?

uraas — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:23:00 GMT

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...