Skills for building success in the electronic business environment: today's electronic business environment demands that records and information professionals expand their skills but also provides the opportunity for them to have more influence on an organization's success.

• Author: Weller-Collison, Annette

A corporation takes a routine human resource process online using new interactive voice response (IVR) technology to execute changes to the employees 'benefits plan, allowing the company to save millions annually

A large technology company starts to advertise its business services in a virtual world and develops policy to make sure the good, old fashioned business rules are being satisfied in this new world.

A technology professional wants to use wiki instead of blog technology to keep customers apprised of product developments.

Back-up tapes are routinely accessed to retrieve lost documents for employees, but lawyers worry they will be preempted from arguing that discovery should not have to be undertaken on the tapes because the data on them is "inaccessible" under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP).

Those who do not know what "IVR" is, cannot differentiate a wiki from a blog, have never heard of Internet-based virtual world video game Second Life[R], or do not know what the FRCP are or about the many changes made to them in 2006 may not be tooled for today's record and information management (RIM) problems.

As the business world has gone electronic, top to bottom, the role of RIM professionals has had to change in major ways. Long gone are the days when their focus was the records inventory, offsite storage, and retrieval of paper records. RIM professionals must now manage complex, multi-disciplinary information issues with skills that may have been developed initially in the typewriter generation.

The Impact of the Electronic World on the RIM Environment

The amount of digital information to be managed is truly staggering. According to a March 2008 IDC white paper called The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, the size of the digital universe in 2007 was 281 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes), and it is estimated the size of the digital universe by 2011 will be 10 times that figure. In The Sedona Principles: Best Practices Recommendations and Principles for Addressing Electronic Document Production, The Sedona Conference Working Group notes that compounding the management complexities is the fact that most information is being created in electronic form.

Executives now have a greater responsibility than ever before--they are now accountable for ensuring that their organizations' information assets are properly managed. As the disintegration of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm demonstrated, organizations and their executive management face severe consequences from their employees' misdeeds--even their mistakes--whether failing to protect private information, retain the right records, or produce documents requested in litigation. The cost of noncompliance is not measured only in dollars; the reputation of the enterprise itself is at stake.

As gatekeepers to their organizations' information assets, RIM professionals have a vital role to play in the management of these assets. Records management is now a component of the organization's strategic direction. RIM professionals must drive the development of policies and procedures that support both the employees who must implement the strategies and the technologies that facilitate them.

This new role is broader than merely the retention of records. RIM professionals must, in fact, focus on the entire lifecycle of information. This approach recognizes that the value of an information asset changes over time as it is used by different organizational units for different purposes. In addition, it requires that issues such as privacy and security be addressed.

The sheer volume of information an organization must manage also places increasing importance upon appropriate management of non-records, which is information that has no long-term business, statutory, or regulatory value. RIM professionals must raise awareness of the costs that non-records can impose on the company, including the costs of unearthing information for business purposes or to respond to regulatory inquiry or litigation.

The major shift in the business and technical landscape means that RIM professionals have to manage more business content that does not broadcast its "recordness" in environments where employees or technology professionals have exclusive province over information. They must deal with a whole host of new content and the various media on which it is stored in order to properly manage these information assets throughout their entire lifecycle.

The Value RIM Professionals Bring to the Organization

The right RIM professional can add to the enterprise's bottom line in concrete ways, helping organizations:

Reduce risk of non-compliance. Organizations are able to more accurately respond to regulatory and litigation requests when they are able to locate the appropriate information assets. In addition, because the information is more accessible, and there are fewer non-records to sift through, responses to such requests are timelier and less expensive.

Improve employee...