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Records Management: Challenges Include Cost, Complexity and Apathy
While organizations are gradually becoming more satisfied with their Records Management (RM) systems, RM systems continue to pose a number of challenges that have been difficult for many organizations to surmount.
Four of the main challenges that plague many RM systems are:
- How to reduce complexity and time required to deploy solutions
- How to keep costs down
- How to improve E-discovery capabilities
- How to achieve greater recognition within the organization
These findings and others from a Forrester/ARMA study are summarized in an article by Brian Hill which appears in the Sept-Oct issue of ARMA’s Information Management magazine.
The ARMA report found that:
- Despite overall uncertainties in budgets, as many as 40 percent of companies will be increasing their spending on RM by at least 5 percent in 2012. The addtional money will be spent on upgrades to their existing RM systems, purchase of new RM systems, and money spent on RM consultants and integrators.
- About one third of RM spending is going towards systems based on Microsoft SharePoint, although of those SharePoint systems being used for RM, 37 percent use RM software from third-party vendors other than Microsoft.
- 81 percent of organizations say that achieving RM policy consistency is a major objective for 2012, and 83 percent said that addressing regulatory compliance was an important issue for them in the next year too.
As for Records Management and the cloud, many organizations remain skeptical. From the perspective of many records managers, cloud solutions for RM have not yet fully addressed their concerns about security, privacy and regulatory requirements.
Brian Hill, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and author of the ARMA report, told Ben Cole of TechTarget’s SearchCompliance that “I think the records manager has potential to have a greater influence and greater impact within organizations… I think it’s important for records managers to have a seat at the table so that they are able to provide some guidance on making these purchases [of RM systems, particularly cloud-based ones]. A lot of companies are leaping before they look — they are rolling out cloud-based applications without giving much thought to how they are going to handle retention and disposition, and that’s a mistake.”
