Beyond the Box: Penn Archive Shows Businesses What They Can Do with Records Storage

By Amy Perras | Posted May 16, 2012 | 0

If you ask the average business manager what they can get out of records storage and management, they may not know what you are talking about. Some will look at it as a hassle, that much is for sure, while others will generally see it as a necessary evil that needs to be dealt with to maintain regulatory compliance. Only a select few see records management as an opportunity, and it is those visionaries that are doing the most for their businesses.

Boiled down to its absolute barest bones, records management and storage is all about securing key information and complying with regulations. But it is so very much more.

Organizations that prioritize records management as part of their employee and community engagement projects can use their storage and management resources to better connect their workers to the company and develop more meaningful relationships with customers and members of the community. A recent example is the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) archive system.

According to a recent report published on the university’s website, the Penn archive has been functioning for decades, but has recently put a few key changes into action. These shifts are helping the university connect with researchers, the local community and students in a more meaningful way, helping to generate excitement about the institution’s accomplishments over the years and spurring growth opportunities.

This began in the 1980s, according to the report, when a new retrieval and delivery system made records more accessible and easier to search. This was followed by a major milestone in 2009, when the facility was moved from Franklin Field, the university’s football stadium, to a dedicated archive site nearby. This has allowed the staff to employ new practices that draw the university’s community into its history, prestige and future goals. For example, historian and web master Alyssa Sheldon is now using Twitter to reveal photographs and official records pertaining to the university’s past to reach out to students, faculty, staff and others interested in the academic institution.

Within businesses, these kinds of practices can generate major results. Releasing key corporate strategic goals can help employees see where their work falls into the big picture, motivating them and making them more productive. Similarly, using records to showcase the company’s history can make workers feel like they are part of something more meaningful than their day-to-day activities, motivating them to work more effectively.

What are you doing to look beyond the box and connect your records and information management program to better your community and engage employees?

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Be Excellent to Each Other: Sharing the Joy of Shredding with Your Employees

By John Willoughby | Posted May 15, 2012 | 0

You hire someone to work for you. They do things that you tell them to do, and you give them money. Pretty simple. And while there was often more to it than that in the past, after a few decades of downturn-inspired rightsizing, it often doesn’t go much further. Lifetime employment is a thing of our parent’s generation – or even our grandparents’ in some cases.  Companies simply can’t afford to guarantee that they will keep an employee on forever regardless of the business climate. Several dramatic downturns left companies struggling to simply remain alive while trying to adjust to lower sales and lower margins.

The flip side of this is that employees in general have been left without the level of corporate loyalty that their parents had. You are probably not going to be at your current company for life. It’s probably not even a long term relationship and more and more full time employees started looking more like contract workers. Sure, you are part of a team, but if the company doesn’t go the extra mile for you, why should you go the extra mile for the company?

But this is short sighted. A happy employee is a productive employee. An employee that believes that the company cares about them is more likely to put in that extra time or deliver that extra inspiration, even when the absence would not be noticed. Of course the economy mandates that people get hired and they get laid-off. That’s an unfortunate fact of the times we live in. But a smart company, one that wants its employees to give 110 percent, is going to show that they do actually care about their employees and is willing to also give 110 percent  back (at least as much as  possible).

And the interesting thing is that this doesn’t have cost a lot. It’s often the little things that can mean so much because it shows that they care. Employees working late and miss dinner? Spend a few dollars and have some instant soups or snacks in the convenience area. If you’re getting 2 extra hours out of someone, isn’t that worth spending $1.00 on a snack? If the whole team is working late, send out for a pizza. What do the employees make per hour? How much did that pizza cost? Do the math.

Ironically, there are things that companies can do to help their employees that will actually end up saving them money as well. Look at how many health insurance plans now cover health club memberships. Because, oh gosh, they finally figured out that it’s cheaper to keep people healthy in the first place than giving them medical care after they get sick.

One interesting benefit that companies can give their employees is access to free shredding. It’s an extra perk that makes the employee’s life a little easier by freeing them from having to hand feed a home shredder with bills, receipts, and endless pre-approved credit card applications. And it really doesn’t cost the company much – shredding services just aren’t that expensive, especially considering what they offer.

And it’s even actually in the best interest of the company to do it as well. Why is that? Think about it: an employee gets sloppy with their financial information because the shredder at home is sometimes just too much trouble. So, they toss out a few envelopes with credit card applications or even that pile of tax documents from 10 years ago. Hey, no one ever really gets that information stolen, do they? Turns out they do. In fact, I met someone just last week who had exactly that happen to him. He thought, “It can’t happen to me,” and got lazy with his information. Someone went through his trash and got enough information to begin stealing his identity. Turns out this caused more than a little trouble because he was the communications officer on a nuclear submarine and had all kinds of secret clearance. When the Navy found out someone was forging his identity, they were not happy about it.

So, even if you are not someone with super-secret clearance, fixing identity theft is no small matter. Many, many phone calls, emails and letters are needed to begin to undo the damage. Most of these calls will be made to other businesses. During work hours. When you would normally be working. Get the picture? You can end up losing days or even weeks of work time trying to put your world back in order. Not good for you, not good for your employer.

So maybe giving employees access to free shredding isn’t just a nice thing for the company to do, it’s also something that ultimately helps them as well. You shred everything you should, no one steals your identity, and you don’t have to spend work time recovering.

Being nice to your employees isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also good business. Loyalty begets loyalty. So buy someone a pizza next time they work late. Give them a gym membership. Throw a few snacks in the common area. And let them bring in their documents to toss into your shred bins. Everyone wins – except the thieves, of course.

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Get the Best of Both Worlds for Data Backup and Recovery

By Jeremy Suratt | Posted May 14, 2012 | 0

As an IT professional, one of your most difficult jobs is getting senior managers on board with making a change. What can you say? Some people are just set in their ways. The task requires a savvy pro to convince management that changes are necessary to reduce costs and redirect the saving to fund specific projects and innovation, and ensure the success of the organization.

Some of you may find this to be the case for data backup and recovery too. Changes may be necessary given the critical importance placed on enterprise data.

These days, decisions-makers are finding that taking a hybrid approach to data protection is the way to go. Specifically, companies can often mix tape storage and the cloud to get the most effective results possible.

For example, the quick access to data stored in the cloud makes it a perfect technology for short-term information, in other words smaller sets of data that may have to be accessed and recovered often. Tape, on the other hand, is a much better option for archiving needs. The media has a long lifespan, making it a robust technology for long-term storage and a reliable means for complying with industry and government regulations.

There are several tips you can follow to make the case for updating and modernizing a backup and recovery plan.

1. Set a Target

Those in charge of the budget need to know what you plan on doing with the company’s money. So tell them. Of course, your ideas must be shaped by the organization’s objectives.

Continuing with the example of mixing technologies for backing up data, a company’s decision to invest more in tape or an emerging technology, will be determined by its requirements for recovery. If your industry is highly regulated, it’s probably better that you place a higher priority on tape and offsite tape vaulting.

2. Consider Infrastructure and Time

According to experts, companies should think about backup and recovery like this: The time it takes to back up information is on par with the capacity of all applications needed to be protected divided by the performance – measured in terabytes per hour – of a current solution.

To put it simply, part of making the case for making changes to a data protection program will require getting into the specifics. Decision-makers will want to know how effective the new, layered approach will be.

3. Be Sure to Mention the Cost of Downtime

We saved this one for last because it can serve as your “ace in the hole” or the “cherry on top” of a strong argument. Since the decision-maker is looking at a possible deployment in terms of dollars and cents, so should you. Let him or her know exactly what it will cost the company should it be cut off from critical data.

This figure will be different for individual organizations, but in this instance it’s OK to use industry averages to make your case.

Judging by industry estimates, energy firms are most impacted by downtime and can suffer losses of $2.8 million per hour. The average for telecoms is also up there, at $2 million per hour, followed by manufacturing firms, which stand to lose $1.6 million per hour of downtime. Financial firms, meanwhile, stand to lose about $1.5 million per hour when knocked offline.

No company wants to be caught in such a position, and no longer has to be, because innovative and reliable data backup options are available today.

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Federal Records Management: The Agency Self-Assessment

By Rachel Theran | Posted May 14, 2012 | 0

On May 1st, NARA (National Association of Records Archives) posted their agency self -assessment report.  This is where all of the federal agencies self-report how they are performing against the statutory and regulatory records management requirements.  Interestingly, this self-assessment was conducted before the Obama administrations memorandum about records management.

Not surprising, is that agencies do not have adequate controls for most major activities, and are greatly lacking in understanding how to manage electronic records.  They’re lacking training, and are overwhelmed by the volume of records.

Sadly, since the last survey, small amounts of progress were made, but the general consensus is that the recommendations from the 2010 response still hold.

This year there was an emphasis in the executive action recommendations to create a deeper partnership of records managers and IT, as well as the need for training.  Moreover, there was an emphasis on having a holistic policy on records management, something that we’ve talked about a lot, and we’re addressing with our Unified Records Management framework.

Now, I didn’t count all of the answers, but there are obviously more agencies that were high risk than low risk, the pattern of scores was not promising.  This is not great news given that new rules and regulations are being issued July 27th in the federal directive around the new rules for Records Management. It’s not hopeless; there are people out there who are industry experts to help.

What can a federal records manager do?  You can take a look at where your agency ranked, and see if there is anything that you can do to get organized while you wait for the new directive.

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Courts Often Face a Records Management Quagmire

By Amy Perras | Posted May 14, 2012 | 0

A quagmire is a swamp. A bog. A soft, mushy, messy patch of earth that is half land, half water and not enough of either to give it clear definition. If you live in New England, you can probably imagine the cranberry bogs that are famously spread throughout the region as a prime example of a quagmire. Not surprisingly, the term is also used to describe the situation entities get themselves into when they are involved in the type of trouble that meets all of those attributes. The kind of problem where you get sucked into turmoil so slowly that you barely notice, only to eventually be sucked into the earth as the mud that has been sticking to your boots for months finally weighs you down so much that there is nowhere to go. In many cases, court systems can find themselves in a records storage and management quagmire.

Over the past few decades, or centuries in some cases, court systems throughout the United States have maintained paper records detailing key information about trials. At first glance, keeping paperwork on site made perfect sense. During trials, judges and clerks had access to the records they needed to understand the case and they could research past trials from the region with similar issues to inform their judgments. The system worked. But over the past few years, many of the attics and basements filled with paper records have turned into quagmires that are overwhelming courthouses, leading to structural damages, overwhelming records management challenges and a system that sometimes feels so antiquated that it is easy to wonder how it has lasted so long.

When a teenager at school can grab a smartphone and research old case files for a research paper while a judge is being given paper packets that were specially collected by a full-time clerk, the problem is clear. But it is always easier to fall into a quagmire than it is to escape. When you first enter you haven’t gathered all kinds of muck on your clothes from patches with more mud than solid ground. You also aren’t tired of trying to keep going for an extended period without relief. In many courtrooms around the country, clerks are overworked and budgets are stretched to their limits trying to keep up with outdated records management processes, few have the resources needed to take on an ambitious new project.

Because the resources really aren’t there to establish sweeping digitization projects that also meet security and regulatory demands throughout the legal industry – not to mention paper’s vital role in many facets of operation – seeking relief in more manageable phases is necessary. Working with a records management company can meet this need for many court systems feeling overwhelmed by their records storage predicaments.

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