Planning for Electronic Records Management (ERM)

Defining best practice and agreeing the best technology platforms

Tony Hendley, Managing Director, Cimtech Ltd

Records management past and present
For many organisations, particularly in the public sector, records management (RM) has traditionally been synonymous with paper files and registries or records centres where dedicated staff opened new files as requested, kept the files centrally and kept docket books listing who the files belonged to and the subject coverage.

Many organisations also made use of microfilm technology to store records at some point in their life. Once folders were closed and if they had to be stored for long periods of time it could be economic to film them and destroy the original so the amount of space required for storage was significantly reduced. Hence many archive record collections are stored on a mix of paper and microfilm media.

Over time the manual registry lists were replaced by computer databases with RM software that provided records staff with the ability to create a computer record for each file and file part and check file parts into and out of the registry.

Active registry systems were labour-intensive as registry staff had to do all the paper filing and retrieve all the files required by staff. Many organisations moved to RM systems where records staff would register a file for users and then issue the file out to the owner of the file and the file would stay with the owner in their office until it was no longer active at which point it would be sent back to the Records Centre. Records staff would then review the file at the agreed time and destroy the file or transfer it to an archive for permanent preservation. The problem with this was that the responsibility for ensuring that all relevant papers were placed on file lay with staff in offices who were not always trained or motivated to maintain complete records.
Most medium-to-large organisations define a subset of their documents to be records and have more or less well-documented policies and procedures defining how those records should be managed in a controlled way throughout their life. Central government departments have corporate file plans and documented retention schedules for records.

The challenge of electronic records
As computers were widely adopted an increasing percentage of documents were created and held as digital files on shared server drives. For many users the electronic documents were more accessible than the paper copies so they tended to stop printing out file copies of electronic documents. The result was that for any particular topic some records were held on a paper file and some held on magnetic disk. In many cases the directories and folders set up on shared drives did not match the files held in the registry and the result was incomplete records. This problem became even more acute with the widespread use of e-mails and attachments.

Records managers looked at the new DIP (Document Image Processing) and EDM (Electronic Document Management) systems to see whether they could be used to manage their records but in the late 1980s and early 1990s the suppliers were focused on meeting the need to manage active documents which had to be routed around an organisation, annotated and edited. There were very few, if any, facilities provided for corporate classification, declaration and disposition. In addition, most systems were designed only to manage electronic documents when what the records managers needed was hybrid systems that could manage old paper records and new electronic records.

A number of the suppliers of records management software for controlling paper records enhanced their systems to manage electronic records as well. In addition some new suppliers focused on the electronic records management market exclusively. But there were no standards for best practice in electronic records management and the electronic document management software was relatively immature and fast moving in the mid 1990s so not much progress was made.

Three criteria for successful ERM
So in the mid-to-late 1990s traditional paper RM systems were creaking and proving expensive to maintain; new electronic document management systems did not provide all the facilities needed to support corporate electronic records management and there was no clear guidance in terms of procedures and specifications for an electronic records management system. To move forward there was a need for three criteria to be fulfilled.

Firstly, organisations needed to agree that there was a requirement and a business case for corporate ERM systems. Secondly, the records management profession needed to agree best practice for records management in general and for electronic records management in particular. Thirdly, the industry had to provide systems that were scalable, stable and capable of supporting all the requirements for a corporate ERM system.

Below we review the considerable progress that has been made in all three areas which has resulted in the surge of interest in ERM in the public and private sector.

The Business Case for ERM
In 2003 most internal documents are created electronically on an office package and the bulk of incoming records—particularly e-mails and attachments and Web pages—are also coming in in electronic format. All organisations of any size are also well on the road towards establishing an e-business environment where they are trying to maximise the volume of business that is conducted electronically. In particular, they are looking to manage key business processes across the intranet, extranet and Internet to cut costs, widen their marketplace and meet government targets for electronic service delivery. To support e-business initiatives and gain the maximum benefit from the move away from paper to electronic business, organisations need finally to make the move away from paper-based records management systems to electronic records management.
Central government has been set targets to manage all new records in electronic format by 2004 and most central government departments and many agencies are in the process of planning for and procuring ERM systems. ERM is high on the priority list of many organisations. So the first of the three criteria for ERM is being met. Public and private sector organisations increasingly accept that they need a corporate RM policy and a strategy for implementing an ERM system.

Best Practice for RM and ERM
Over the past five years the RM profession has also responded with some excellent guidelines and standards outlining best practice for information management and records management and functional requirements for an ERM system. In the 2003 Document, content and records management guide Cimtech reviews all the standards in some detail.

The PRO and MoReq Electronic Records Management Requirements are two documents designed to help organisations to define their specific requirements for Electronic Records Management systems. The Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records (MoReq) was prepared for the IDA programme of the European Commission by Cornwell Affiliates plc. The PRO Requirements for Electronic Records Management Systems were produced by the Public Record Office in 1999 and revised in 2002. The PRO document covers the requirements of UK public bodies and hence is more relevant than MoReq to the public sector. The PRO document clarifies the fact that “these generic requirements are not a full specification. They form a baseline which sets out, in the mandatory part of the requirements, the minimum necessary to undertake credible electronic records management.” The key entities defined in each document are similar and are presented in table on p.85. Unfortunately, the terms used to describe them vary.

Brief review of the key standards and guidelines
Principles of Best Practice for Information Management
BSI DISC publication Principles of Good Practice for Information Management PD 0010 authored in 1997 by Bill Mayon White and Bernard Dyer of the Image Document Management Association (IDMA) with the input of many other organisations and associations.

Lord Chancellors Code of Practice on the Management of Records under Section 46 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

ISO 15489-1: 2001 – Records Management Parts 1 & 2
issued in two parts in 2001 in order to standardise international practice in records management. Part one provides general guidance to managers on establishing records management policies and procedures and systems. It defines records management as comprising six elements:
• Setting policies and standards
• Assigning responsibilities and authorities
• Establishing and promulgating procedures and guidelines
• Providing a range of services relating to the management and use of records
• Designing, implementing and administering specialised systems for managing records, and
• Integrating records management into business systems and processes
The standard states that any records system should have the functionality that enables it to carry out and support the following records management processes and controls:
• Determining documents to be captured into a records system
• Determining how long to retain records
• Records capture
• Registration
• Classification
• Storage and handling
• Access
• Tracking
• Implementing disposition
• Documenting records management processes
Part 2 is an implementation guide for use by records management professionals.

The 2002 PRO document defines a series of core requirements
• Record organisation: the classification scheme; classes, folders and folder parts
• Record capture, declaration and management
• Search, display and presentation
• Retention and disposal: disposal schedule definition, allocation and execution; resolving conflicts; review and destruction
• Access control
• Audit
• Reporting
• Usability
• Design and performance
• Compliance with other standards

Platforms for ERM
Once the PRO defined the requirements for an ERM system the stage was set for suppliers to develop stable and scalable solutions to meet the requirements. User organisations have historically taken several approaches to managing electronic records and we review those briefly below before outlining what is now seen to be the preferred approach and the one most suppliers are adopting.

Accredited shared drives
The first and most basic option—if you already had a records management software application for managing paper records and did not have an EDM system—was to try and organise a hybrid system. A number of government departments took this approach initially as a short-term measure. It involves adding controls to shared drives to use shared drives to replace print and file methods for electronic documents.

The records management software would be used to manage paper files and would hold the attribute data or metadata for the electronic folders as well. For each folder you would then set up an electronic folder in a directory on the shared drive and a corresponding paper folder on the records management application.
Strict controls were needed to define who could set up new folders and how and when the folders would be set to read only status to avoid accidental erasure. The benefit of this option is that it avoids procuring a new system and avoids a lot of re-engineering issues. However, there are a number of problems with this option which really preclude such a simple option if the organisation wishes to comply with the PRO and MoReq requirements.

The big weakness was the difficulty of maintaining the link between the drives and the records management folder definitions. There was also no control over file naming, formats and e mail attachments and errors increase as volumes increase.

The lifespan of the system is limited by the lack of methods for exporting, archiving, migrating or disposing of records. Such systems are not easy to use and do not provide easy access to records. Hence such options are not recommended as long term solutions—only as a short term stop gap until funds can be obtained for a full system implementation.

Back-end dedicated ERM systems
The second option assumes that you do not have an EDM system and that you want to replace or enhance your existing records management application with software that can manage electronic as well as paper records as a back-end solution. This option would effectively implement an ERMS to capture closed files from shared drives. The new ERMS would replace the old paper records management application for the management of paper files and would hold the attributes of electronic folders.

The ERMS would hold non-current electronic documents/records only. No functionality would be provided for current documents. Files would be transferred in bulk from the shared drives when closed or when disk space dictated this. This would require mapping the shared drive folder structure to the ERMS folder structure.
This would be a relatively low-cost solution again. The system does not, however, provide any real improvement in records management as the documents on the shared drive are open to user errors and there is no audit trail to prove integrity. Users may or may not transfer all their documents to the required folder. They could transfer documents to the wrong folders. This option does not meet all the PRO requirements and does not support any electronic business processes at the front end, e.g. scanning and routing correspondence, etc. This option is, therefore, again only a short-term solution.

Using an existing EDM system
Most electronic document management systems were implemented to manage active documents and make them available to support core business processes. Most EDM systems did not, until recently, provide records management or long-term archiving functions and hence, on their own, such systems did not support the core PRO requirements for corporate classification, declaration and sustainability and retention and disposal.
However, if you have purchased a system from a major supplier then they should either have a partnership arrangement with one or more ERM suppliers to provide a suite that can offer integrated electronic document and records management facilities or they should have developed an ERM module which will allow you to upgrade to an integrated EDM and ERM solution as explored below.

Using an integrated solution
The preferred option is an integrated solution. This should provide you with the facilities you need to automate active business processes at the front end and to then declare a subset or all the documents/content as records and manage them safely and securely and flexibly in folders in an ERM environment. Today some suppliers offer a full integrated product suite. In other cases integrators can combine an EDM/ECM solution with an ERM solution.

Such solutions should provide the best of both worlds. You can start with a relatively simple implementation in some departments and processes where electronic documents are created and then declared as records and saved on the system. You can then move on to address more challenging applications such as capturing and managing incoming correspondence; managing the publication of active documents that go through multiple versions, etc.

You are looking to achieve the required balance between flexibility for EDM/ECM and active document and content processing and stability and permanence in the ERM element of the system where you want records to be preserved for decades.

The future: Enterprise Content Management solutions
While we can agree that an integrated solution is the right option for most organisations, there are still a number of choices to be made. What sort of an active system do you need? Today, the tools available for unstructured or semi-structured information management include: document management, records management, content management, Web content management, knowledge management and digital asset/rights management . At one level they all manage unstructured and semi-structured information. At another level, they offer a range of different functions geared to handling specific requirements and it is important for users to appreciate the difference between the solutions out on the market. Cimtech’s Document, content and records management guide reviews the different systems and their functions in detail.
There is a growing trend for all the functions described above to be integrated in an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution or framework. A full ECM solution should be capable of managing content and documents from creation or capture to destruction. Such an ECM solution would need to provide all of the back-office and front-office functions listed below.

Each of these functions are described in detail in the Document, content and records management guide. When procuring a system you need to specify in your Statement of Requirements (SOR) exactly which functions are required currently and in the future.

Preparing for ERM
In order to prepare for an ERM system you need to study the best practice guidance listed above and benchmark your current RM policies, procedures and systems against them. This should result in a list of areas that need improvement. Some of these should be addressed prior to procuring a system—some of them can be addressed in parallel or will be addressed by the system itself. The areas you need to consider include:
• RM policy
• Roles and responsibilities
• RM procedures and guidelines
• Regulatory and legislative compliance
• Design and documentation of RM systems
• Integration of RM into business systems and processes
A detailed account of the steps you need to take to prepare for an ERM system can be found in chapters 3 and 4 of Cimtech’s Document, content and records management guide. The key actions that most organisations undertake prior to defining their requirements for an integrated ERM solution include the following:
• Project initiation document—define business objectives
• Review best practice and benchmark your RM procedures and systems
• Business process modeling and analysis
• Records audit
• IT infrastructure review
• Feasibility study/options review
• Business case for preferred option
• Implement recommended improvements (corporate classification scheme; retention schedules; RM policy and procedures; define roles and responsibilities, etc.)
• Develop Statement of Requirement
• Procure solution
• Ongoing project management.

Enterprise content management system functions
• Document capture
• Content creation
• Content syndication
• Indexing and retrieval
• Classification
• Repository management
• Records management
• Processing/version control
• Collaboration/process management
• Application integration
• Content distribution
• Website development
• Web publishing
• Personalisation
• Digital asset/rights management
• Application development and administration

Records audit
Cimtech has carried out a large number of audits for clients of all sizes and from all sectors. We use a combination of techniques to gather and validate the data. We issue detailed questionnaires to all file series owners and run workshops to explain exactly how the questionnaires should be completed. The questionnaires will vary depending on the exact requirements and priorities of the client but they all ask the questions listed above plus a number of more detailed questions.
We back this up with interviews and inspections of the records and cross-compare the data gathered and follow up with telephone calls or return visits to resolve any anomalies. The result is a detailed audit contained in a spreadsheet and a set of detailed notes for each department or section visited or each set of processes reviewed.

These findings can then be analysed, together with the results of the process modeling exercise and IT review and documented as a deliverable. The results of the audit will be a detailed account of the current document and records management policies, procedures and systems and a benchmark of those policies, procedures and systems against best practice. They are often used as input to a feasibility review. The organisation or their consultants will review the findings and their business objectives and look at the options available to them.

Procuring an ERM Solution
When it comes to drawing up an ITT for an integrated system then, as we have seen above, you cannot simply issue out the PRO or MoReq requirements. They need to be customised to meet your specific requirements and you also need to add in your other requirements. If you do not have an EDM/ECM system you need to define your active capture, EDM/ECM and workflow management requirements and if you do already have an EDM/ECM system you need to specify how you want to integrate the EDM/ECM and ERM software. (See box above for Cimtech’s standard ITT template.)

Cimtech’s standard ITT template
Section 1 covers the scope of the project and details how the procurement will be managed and what the supplier will be expected to deliver.
Section 2 details the current organisation, the objectives for the new system and the current IT usage—whether you have an EDM/ECM or a paper RM application; what IT standards you follow, etc.
Section 3 defines the functional requirements. In addition to the PRO and/or MoReq requirements you need to cover your EDM/ECM requirements, your workflow management requirements and the integration required with existing applications.
Section 4 covers technical requirements including the volumetrics; the existing IT infrastructure and the standards the system must comply with.
Section 5 will request product information and details of vendor services to be provided—system implementation, pre- and post-implementation support, integration, process automation, project management, training, documentation and data migration.
Section 6 is the vital cost schedule where it is important to ensure that all software and services that have been requested are costed in the bid.

Suppliers
There are close to fifty suppliers of traditional and electronic records management application software in the UK. Most of them are listed in the Document, content and records management guide. A smaller but growing number of suppliers provide integrated EDRM systems.

Most of these submitted their products to be tested by the PRO and have been approved by the PRO as meeting their 1999 version of the requirements. Since the PRO updated their requirements in late 2002 a series of suppliers have arranged to have their products tested against the new requirements. The results have not yet been published. For suppliers approved against the 1999 requirements see box below.

Documentum recently acquired TrueArc to strengthen their ERM offering and position themselves as an ECM supplier. IBM has also recently acquired Tarian who supply an ERM module that IBM market as the IeR (IBM e-Records) engine. Many other suppliers are adding ERM modules to existing EDM and ECM applications. A full list of approved suppliers or suppliers scheduled to be tested against the 2002 requirements can be found on the PRO website—www.pro.gov.uk/records management.

There is now a good installed base of integrated ERM solutions in central government and a growing interest in the private sector and local authorities. Cimtech, together with the PRO, is staging a one-day conference entitled Electronic document, content and records management for e-government on 20 May 2003 which is aimed specifically at local and central government and all public sector bodies.

Cimtech is currently advising a number of central government departments, agencies and local authorities on how best to plan for ERM and are assisting them through all the key stages of a procurement.

Supplier Product
Cimage Novasoft E3
Dexmar KnowPro v 6.21
Diagonal Solutions Wisdom
Documentum (TrueArc) ForeMost Enterprise v 2.5
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001
Fabasoft Egov suite v 4.0.1
Hummingbird Docs RM 3.2
Meridio Records Manager v 3.0
Objective Objective 2000 plus
Open Text Livelink iRIMS Record Management 2.0 x
IRIMS Studio 2001
Tower Software TRIM Captura 4.3
Tower Technology T2 e-records
Valid Information Systems R/KYV version 9

Reference
Document,Content and Records Management Guide. A comprehensive guide to document, content and records management and a directory of products and services. 14th edition. 2003. ISBN 0-9537954-5-4.
Cimtech Ltd, University of Hertfordshire, 45 Grosvenor Road, St Albans, Hertfordshire AL1 3AW Tel 01727 813651. www.cimtech.co.uk; e-mail: c.cimtech@herts.ac.uk.