Records and Information Management (RIM) is a business component vital to organizational success, yet it is rarely an organization’s top priority. Underpinning RIM practices at an organizational level is imperative to meeting legal requirements for government agencies and businesses in highly regulated industries. Are you doing your annual file plan reviews? If yes, you are in great shape, right? Have you considered that organizations re-organize, information systems become obsolete, others get decommissioned, and regulations change? An annual file plan review alone will never account for all ..read more

Do information governance principles apply to your organization’s mailroom? Mail has typically been a perfunctory function aligned with other physical office services, but for many organizations, the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted mail to a critical—and digital—operation. Mail workflows include sensitive client information, launch new work, and therefore often billable activity. This means matter-centric record creation is starting right from mail delivery, not later from a pile on a desk—even if it is a digital pile on a virtual desk. Protection and integrity of client information have always ..read more

This article is my advice for a holistic approach to QA/QC for document capture projects. It is also a recommendation to audit the effectiveness of QC methodologies used (or to be used) by a service provider. I tried my best to harness lessons learned and expertise gained during more than half a century in the computer industry, half of which has been focused on digital document capture. I always tried to defy conventional wisdom using creative new methodologies against a very conservative industry segment once dominated by micrographic entrepreneurs. After a few years of assisting several mi ..read more

A common misconception is that only financial- and personnel-powerful archives like state and federal archives have the resources to implement an exhibit displaying part of its archival collection. You may think that such an exhibit would not be possible for a small in-house archive team whose primary workflow includes processing, maintaining, and preserving its records and documents. However, you may be surprised what a small or in-house archiving team can accomplish with relatively few resources. Why Implement an Exhibit? Of course, there is the question of why display the organization’s ar ..read more

Just tell me which records we must retain in paper! This is a common frustration among records managers and information governance (IG) professionals. Those responsible for maintaining and producing records want to retain or transfer their records using the most efficient method of storage, but do not want to break the law by retaining the information in an illegal format. The purpose of this article is to provide records managers and IG professionals with guidance on determining which records they should retain in paper and which records may be retained electronically. This process involves ..read more

This year, ARMA International released the Information Governance Implementation Model (IGIM), beta version. There are, of course, other information governance (IG) models available to the community, each looking at IG through a different lens. Why should you take the time to look at yet another model? At the highest level: 1) because the IGIM offers an implementation-focused approach that we think many practitioners will find especially useful, and 2) because it will enable you to better use the resources ARMA has already collected and is building around this model. What is the IGIM? The IG ..read more

This article is part of a collaboration between ARMA and AIEF and is included in Information Management Magazine, ARMA-AIEF Special Edition, which will be available for download in November. A printed version of the special issue will be available as well, for a nominal fee. Documentation the Emblem of Modern Society? Documentation is a central feature of the contemporary world. We are immersed in documents in nearly every sphere of life and constantly engage with them. Our lives, in many ways, are “document-pervaded.”[i] Documents are created, deployed, and used to help us communicate, organ ..read more

The following is an excerpt from the ARMA Guide to the Information Profession. Words matter and word choices matter. In any profession that is looking to move forward in maturity, there are often vernacular issues that make gaining a comprehensive understanding of the profession a challenge. This is one of the reasons bodies of knowledge are so incredibly helpful: they help to clarify the vocabulary of a profession. ​The information profession is filled with confusing terms, misused terms, and confusing acronyms. We revel in using words like “content” and “document” interchangeably (they’re n ..read more