11 best practices for effective RM.

As companies increasingly look to records management solutions to help them comply with an ever-growing list of laws and regulations, it is critical to have a good records management plan from the start.

Open Text Corp., a provider of enterprise content management software, has released a list of 11 best practices to help firms build a successful, effective records management program that will support a comprehensive enterprise-wide compliance strategy.

According to Bill Forquer, executive vice president of Open Text's Compliance Solutions Business, companies should:

1. Focus on business processes: Recognize that records management is a business process issue, not a technology issue. Compliance should be a part of the way people work, not an additional job. Work closely with the IT department, but be sure the business owners define the project charter and funding formula and sponsor the initiative.

2. Present the bigger ROI picture: Define the benefits of the system in terms of cost savings and broader corporate compliance.

3. Consider a full assessment: Depending on the size of the firm's records management challenge, consider bringing in help to get a full assessment of the records management requirements, business risks, and benefits.

4. Use what's already been created to get a head start: Take advantage of existing records management work and expand it into the broader compliance landscape.

5. Align records management with the corporate enterprise content management (ECM) strategy: Consider a records management plan within the firm's broader ECM strategy. Records management rules should be applied across e-mail, images, web content, physical records, and more. This helps identify which problems can be solved in the short-, medium-, and long-term, and what budget allocation is required. It's also the key to moving toward an enterprise-wide compliance approach.

6. Tap existing IT systems: Existing enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and other systems contain all the data needed to describe corporate records. Leverage existing investment in these applications and capture records metadata such as authors, contract numbers, employee IDs, customer numbers, case numbers, and more.

7. Plan for growth: Electronic information can grow rapidly. Don't design a records management system based on today's volumes of information; develop a system that assumes significant growth over time.

8. Create a communication plan: Records management often spans many groups within an organization. Develop a communication plan that carefully outlines not just the appropriate level of awareness for each group, but also rolls out the appropriate level of technology change at various stages.

9. Demonstrate benefits to users: Show users the benefits of a records management system, such as better access to information and smoother business processes. If the system is seen as "more work" because of compliance burdens, user adoption will be slow.

10. Build in measures for success: It is important to know what policies are being enforced and what to do if they are not. Also, someone in the company must be able to attest to the effectiveness of the system. Addressing these variables during the planning phase is critical to long-term, measurable records management success.

11. Share best practices: Bring compliance, records, and other managers together to share best practices and concerns to ensure a dynamic records management program for today and the future.