More than paper: how RIM can influence IT and shape IG.

• Author: Elin, Phyllis
• Position: Records and information management - Information governance - Information technology

Records and information management (RIM) professionals are perfectly positioned and have the requisite expertise to play an advisory role that will help ensure that their organizations are governing all information in all formats in ways that will reduce costs and risks. To step into that role, though, they must forge a collaborative relationship with IT. This article describes how professionals can do that by demonstrating that they understand IT's perspective and can help them meet their unique challenges and goals.

The rapid, dramatic shift from physical records to digital documents is evident in nearly every industry, leading many records managers to question the viability of a career based on managing a format that is decreasing in volume. Although organizations continue to produce volumes of paper that require expert management, job descriptions in records and information management (RIM) are evolving. This is good news because RIM professionals are perfectly positioned to serve in an expanded role--that of information governance (IG) advisor.

In a 2010 blog posting, Gartner analyst Debra Logan writes that Gartner defines IG as "the specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archival, and deletion of information. It includes the processes, roles, standards, and metrics that ensure the effective and efficient use of information in enabling an organization to achieve its goals." A RIM professional lives and breathes every word of that definition as it applies to physical documents, but the same knowledge and expertise are typically not inherent to IT managers, who are responsible for managing the ever-expanding ocean of digital data.

Because compliance regulation and privacy laws--and associated penalties for violating them--apply equally to both paper and digital formats, classifying information based on format is an outdated practice. Forward-thinking organizations see their information as either managed or unmanaged, and RIM professionals are well-versed in this distinction.

They can ensure that information is properly managed through its life cycle and troubleshoot IG gaps that IT managers probably would not recognize. The key to un locking this insight is making sure a relationship between RIM and IT is created and maintained; nurturing such a collaboration, though, requires more than RIM simply sending IT a list of suggestions to...