A Business Agility ebook. Records Management within SharePoint: A guide to best practice

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1 A Business Agility ebook Records Management within SharePoint: A guide to best practice

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3 Business Agility is expert in the delivery of solutions built on Office 365 and SharePoint. 3 We build solutions to both the common and the uncommon. This can be anything from: Intranets, Document Management Systems, workflow processes Migrating you to a new version of SharePoint Planning your information architecture around SharePoint Hosted SharePoint, SharePoint Online and Office 365 Building industry-specific solutions Business Agility Consulting Ltd

4 Records Management - an approach In recent years, many a workplace has undergone a form of digital transformation. This evolution typically involves an improvement to how an organisation manages its records, documents, content or business processes (e.g. automating manual processes). Whether it is transferring physical documents into a digital format or moving a disorganised format to the Cloud companies recognise the business imperative to control content effectively. It can be an all-encompassing task that permutates through all areas and departments of the business. However, the management of a company s records is something that doesn t have to cause headaches for information managers. Records Management is defined as: The field of management responsible for the efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposition of records, including the processes for capturing and maintaining evidence of and information about business activities and transactions in the form of records. This trips off the tongue nicely, but at its heart it s about good practice and effective management of content.

5 Whether your content is held in a single repository or across thousands of disparate systems, Business Agility can help you interact and control it in the most efficient and scalable way. 5 The function that records management has to serve needs to work like a well-oiled machine to be effective and useful within an organisation. E.g. records shouldn t be affected if the person responsible for them leaves the company. Records should be easily searchable, safely secured and properly governed. A lot of this is easier said than done! And, of course, a record doesn t necessarily have to be a document. It can be anything such as: Medical forms Security codes Training videos Maps Plans Legal paperwork Deeds, blueprints Inventories Surveys Accounting/financial papers Appointments A contract Meeting minutes Media releases Promotional material Permits Licenses Insurance information Statistical information Video footage Travel tickets A signature Maintenance logs Test results Contact details A presentation Phone/voice recordings The list goes on. And because of how varied records have become in today s digital world, the management must be slick. Business Agility Consulting Ltd

6 Headaches of Records Management 6 #1 : Regulation Regulated industries are under increased amounts of pressure to be compliant. Where records are a form of data, there s a lot of potential risk involved. This includes where the records are kept and who s got access to them. Keeping records in a filing cabinet in a locked room is now a thing of the past. #2: Out of date processes Out of date processes and software can be dangerous. Especially if you have several processes and pieces of software within your records management process. If your data cannot be secured, then you re at risk of not being compliant with your records and the consequences aren t very palatable. #3: Accessibility Knowing where a record is located, finding it quickly can prove challenging if there are hundreds of thousands of records across the organisation. Easily accessible records cures this headache, but at the same time you need to have the correct accessibility enabled regarding permissions and security. business-agility.com

7 #4: Security 7 When it comes down to working and collaborating with other people things can become more complicated. Permissions of certain records must be monitored and the sharing capabilities need to be supervised too. If someone were to leave the company, would the process of records management be affected? If the answer is yes then your process and infrastructure needs to change. The answer to this should always be no! #5: Lost records Lost records can range from a minor inconvenience for businesses to an enormous hassle that takes months, or even years, to resolve. #6: Compliance with retention policies Depending on the industry you re in different regulations apply, however one common issue is dealing with the schedule for retaining and destroying records. Business Agility Consulting Ltd

8 Hello, SharePoint! 8 SharePoint can be your records management friend. SharePoint is easily overlooked when it comes to records management. It can identify, archive, classify, preserve and destroy records in a sophisticated way and you may already have access to it too. The records management functionality is ready and waiting for you in SharePoint. It s very much an out of the box product, so all you need to do is start using it! SharePoint comes packaged in with every Office 365 plan, so if you have a subscription, you are ready to go. Based in the Cloud, it makes collaboration so much easier. However, that s not to say that it means your records management becomes a free for all when it comes down to access. SharePoint takes permissions seriously, so it s very easy for you to make sure your records are well-governed as well as secure. Because of the sheer number of things SharePoint can do, it s important to know you re doing things correctly; and sometimes it can be difficult to know where to begin. The following guide has been written to illustrate the best practices of how to manage records through SharePoint. The platform may be flexible, but you still need a stable infrastructure in place to ensure it works to your advantage. business-agility.com

9 Our tips for best practice As experts in SharePoint, we know a thing or two about how to make it work well for you. Every organisation is different and will have different sets of rules to abide by to be compliant with their records management. Records may need to be preserved for a long time. This means that finding them needs to be an easy and straightforward process. In its most basic form Records Management is about: 9 Describing a record Synonyms Versioning Retention & Expiration Discovery Storage Review Use Metadata Metadata means you can search for your records a lot easier and filter out what you need. You can base it on content type, client type, project type and more fundamental tags too such as document/record author or when it was last modified. This is enabled in SharePoint columns instead of lots of unnecessary folders (even in the Cloud they can build up and get annoying!). This means when you drag and drop documents into SharePoint, most of your default metadata will already be filled out for you. However, you must have quality information search and ediscovery are driven by good information architecture. It s vital that your workforce understands the value that accurate metadata will provide. Example: If your records are contracts, you will want to run retention/expiration policies against them. For renewable contracts, the expiration policy will allow you to manage the resale process. You can declare records manually (by the owner of the document) or by way of automation. SharePoint excels at this and can automatically declare a document as a record through some simple (or complex!) rules-based workflow. For example, if you use SharePoint to prepare a contract, you can use the built-in SharePoint document management and collaboration facilities to develop the document. However, once the contract has been signed, the contract can be locked down as a record. This can be done manually by the document owner or by ticking a box in SharePoint that indicates that the contract has been signed and an automated workflow will lock it down as a record. Business Agility Consulting Ltd

10 10 Define roles Is there a Records Manager in your organisation? Usually roles such as this exist within a legal and/ or compliance position and they will own almost the entire records management process. However, even if a role of Records Manager isn t defined, the chances are you will have a number of people in the company who are responsible for this type of information management. The other roles you need to identify are those on the IT team to implement systems that efficiently support your records management process. You also need to look for content managers/creators who find where organisational material is kept. These people need to ensure their teams adhere to predefined records management practices. Finally, you need to think about end-users who work with content daily. They need to know the day to day processes and may do a lot of manual work with these documents. Therefore, your end-users are the most important. If they re not bought into the records management process they won t use it properly so good training needs to be provided. business-agility.com

11 Ownership IT isn t necessarily the default owner of records. Permission-based roles need to be established, as does the owner of your records. It is important for content managers to inspect document usage in the organisation to determine which documents and other content types need to be defined as a record. This needs to be defined first, before adopting SharePoint as your System of Record. 11 Establish a retention policy For each record type you ll need to establish: when it s no longer active how long it should be retained after it s no longer active how it should be disposed of In SharePoint, you can apply these settings just to individual items or to entire Sites. (In your library settings in your document library you can change your retention settings.) Have a company plan Your organisation as a whole needs to do this, so it might be part of a bigger picture (company-wide). A suitable plan shows the kinds of items for records, where the records are stored, retention periods for records, and who is responsible for managing the various kinds of records. Make sure you define your standards early on. SharePoint can run reports on your file plans too, which is great for auditing purposes. Business Agility Consulting Ltd

12 Ensure robust governance is in place 12 What do you need? What don t you need? First and foremost, you need to answer basic questions about what you want from a records management system. Who gets to approve/sign off? Is there a compliance framework to adhere to? SharePoint is excellent for structured, auditable, permission-based and secure information management. The key to that is a well-established governance plan. Records Center or In-Place? Are your records ok to stay where they are ( In-Place ) or should they reside within SharePoint s Records Center? This question needs to be answered on a case by case basis. Is your industry subject to regulatory requirements that mandate records to be separated from active documents? Does it physically have to be separated? Do you trust the user in charge of the record Site to maintain these records properly? If you need to keep records for longer than the project they re for, you might need to keep those records elsewhere. This means if your records are in a Site in SharePoint, the site can be shut down when a project has completed and you no longer have to maintain it the records remain secure. Will project members need frequent access to the documents after they have become records? This is where the Records Center in SharePoint can be difficult. Are records managers responsible for everything? (i.e. all info regardless of whether it s active or a record) or just records? Who needs to have certain security who administers things? As mentioned previously, you shouldn t start using SharePoint for your records management needs until a strong governance plan is in place. business-agility.com

13 Reporting and auditing SharePoint handles reporting and auditing well. The platform provides a number of tools allowing you to monitor the life of your records to ensure they comply with your internal policies. Understand a record s lifecycle 13 While some records should be retained forever, others need to be destroyed after an explicit period of time. If this is ignored, businesses could face fines and other such consequences. There should be policies in place for the destruction of records that have legal attachments to them. The method of disposal should be mentioned in the policy. Records Management is about good practice and effective management of content. Business Agility Consulting Ltd

14 Conclusion 14 Hopefully you ll see there is plenty that SharePoint can do for your records management. Best practice isn t necessarily the only way to do things but the tips above are simple guides to help you start on the right foot with SharePoint as your System of Record. The best thing about this is that you may already have access to the platform, which means you don t need to go through the painful task of trying to find a suitable records management solution (which can be very costly!). Remember, governance is key. Once your infrastructure is in place, you re good to go with SharePoint. The Records Center is hugely flexible, and no matter what vertical you re in, it s bound to be helpful for you. Here are a few quick takeaways: Determine what you really need (full records management? Something else?) Identify the right people for the right jobs and get their buy-in Encourage great content management through simple policies Determine whether you need records to remain In-Place or to reside in a Records Center (or a hybrid of both) Do your records hold information that is affected by the new GDPR legislation coming out in May 2018 (we can help with that too) It can be difficult to know where to start that s where we come in. We ve been SharePoint experts for years and can give you all the advice you need to get you started on your new, compliant, secure records management journey. If you d like to know more about Records Management in SharePoint please don t hesitate to get in touch with us. info@business-agility.com business-agility.com

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