What CEOs Need to Know About Records Management.
The Promise of an Intranet - Increasing Revenues and Decreasing Costs.
Historically, the primary purpose of a corporate intranet is to give various departments a location to develop and store the documents they require to do their jobs. Equipping a sales department with an online document library provides every salesperson anywhere in the world with easy access to the latest versions of the organization’s best collateral. This simple example demonstrates how basic document storage can both increase revenues and decrease costs. Unfortunately, this scenario rarely occurs when intranets grow “organically”.
How Intranets can Become a Liability.
In our experience, in intranets that have grown without the benefit of document management policies, a pristine library containing the sales department collateral almost never exists. While a Sales department library is likely to contain a core collection of important documents, it is almost inevitable that it also contains years of obsolete documents and other irrelevant files. (When storage space feels infinite, people rarely delete redundant or extraneous files.) As this key library becomes bloated with outdated and unrelated files, the ability to directly find a specific document is degraded and even the intranets built in search function becomes unreliable. It is at this point that the value proposition of the intranet begins to erode. Members of this hypothetical sales department can no longer easily find the latest, best version of the documents they need to do their job. Sales will decline and costs will increase.
Simple, Effective, Records Management
While most organizations that take on “Records Management” face significant price tags associated with the effort, implementing a simple, fundamental version that guarantees your intranet remains an asset does not have to be expensive. As you probably know, records management strategies use “tags” associated with documents to facilitate their management. One of the tags that already exists for every document is the date the document was last modified. Additional pre-existing tags include date created, file size, etc.
Just Two New Tags Can Protect the Value of your Intranet.
While most full-featured records management approaches would use many new tags, protecting the value of your intranet can be done with just two. Those would be “department” and “category”.
Implementing Simple Records Management
The implementation of a records management strategy normally starts with the creation of an “archive” location containing a library for each of the departments in the intranet. The next step is for the owners of the various departmental libraries to populate the two new tags that are attached to each of their documents. In this scenario our hypothetical sales department would put the word “Sales” as the “department” for each of their documents. They would also identify the “category” for each of their documents. While companywide there might be 100 different possible values for the “category”, the sales department would likely be using values like “collateral”, “forecast”, etc.
Your Digital Self-Cleaning Oven
With the addition of these two tags (referred to as metadata) it now becomes simple to instruct the intranet to automatically move any collateral that has not been modified in the last three years to the Archive Sales library. Suddenly, the Sales department library is clean and effective, and it is going to stay that way automatically. With these two tags a similar rule can be applied to every department and library in the intranet.
The entire intranet environment will now benefit from its libraries and documents being automatically curated. The ROI for the intranet is stabilized and extended.
Additional Benefits
No documents are lost in this curation process. Older, unused documents are simply moved to the archive. Anyone needing to access an older document need only visit the archive to do so. The documents in the archive are already stored in libraries named for their originating department and using the document category makes it easy to find exactly what you are looking for.
Conclusion
While a more robust approach to records management is often required for legal or security reasons, the purpose of this blog is to demystify records management and demonstrate how even the simplest tagging systems can guarantee the long-term benefits of your intranet investment.
Navigating Unusual Digital Transformations, M365, SharePoint, and Teams Situations
In today's ever-evolving digital landscape, unexpected challenges can arise at any moment.
When technology throws a curveball your way, you don't have to face it alone.
The team at Jack Frost Design is specialized in the M365 platform, SharePoint, Teams, Power Platform, and Permissions, AI Digital Transformations and Training. We provide tailored solutions to your unique needs, whether it's initial setup, customization, reskilling your teams or navigating perplexing issues that occasionally come up.
Understanding the significance of your company's document assets, having a dedicated expert on speed dial isn't just good sense—it's essential. With us, you're not merely getting technical expertise; you're gaining a committed partner in ensuring your document management is efficient, secure, and streamlined.
At Jack Frost Design, we offer robust support and transformative solutions that can help your business navigate the challenges of document management.