RETHINKING RECORDS: THE FUTURE OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

TRANSCRIPTION

Host: Hi everyone and welcome back to the Power of Possibility, the podcast where we dig into smart forward-thinking strategies that businesses grow and to help businesses growth and stay ahead. So today we're looking at something that doesn't always get the spotlight, but plays a huge role in how companies operate, which is records management. And no, we're not just talking about files in boxes anymore. 

We'll get into why so many businesses are pushing toward digitization, what's driving that change, and what's getting in the way. Plus, how companies manage the mountain of digital content piling up every day and make sure they're not just holding onto digital trash that clatters their systems. We're also tackling big questions around compliance, hybrid work, and how AI and automation are changing the game. 

So, joining us, have Shioban King. She is the Senior Consultant at Metataxis. Hi Shoban, how are you? 

Shioban King: Thank you. Hi, I'm well, thank you. 

Host: And also, we have Keith Seymour. He's the Solution Director at SPS. How are you, Keith? 

Keith Seymour: Very good, Miguel. Thank you. 

Host: So, it's so nice to have you both here. So, let's start with the basics. What do we mean by records management? I guess that this is much more than just files and boxes on a warehouse shelf, right? 

Siobhan King: Absolutely. So, for me, records management is about having the governance and controls in place to ensure the integrity and the usability of your records and to make sure that you get the best value out of the assets that you have. I like to say that good records management is almost invisible, but bad records management is an obvious liability. 

Host: Okay, so are we seeing a move towards digitization and what is driving that and what are the barriers? 

Siobhan King: So yeah, for me, digitization is a means to an end really. It's a mechanism to try to get everything together into one format because a lot of organizations are dealing with loads and loads of paper. And one of the big problems that you've got when you've got things in a paper format is that you can't access them. 

And I think that's something that became quite clear with the pandemic. So, there's a need to digitize to make things much more accessible and to be able to share things and to be able to access your information while being mobile. So it can be from any place, anywhere. But there's another aspect of wanting to digitize your records, as I said, which is that you kind of want to be able to manage everything in one place rather than having to come up with some kind of plan for how are you going to manage your paper and then another plan for how are you going to manage your digital records.  

Digitization provides the opportunity to kind of turn your paper records into digital records and ingest them into your digital systems that you use for managing your records and apply all of the same labels and all of the same rules to them so that they can then be easily found by your users and they're therefore, you know, considered at the same time as all of your digital records. And more importantly, you're able to apply your compliance controls to them in the same manner as well. And I think that's one of those things where the services that SPS offer, is a really great way of dovetailing with the services that Metataxis is offering, as we're looking at it from a governance perspective, and SPS is looking at it from, I'm speaking on your behalf, Keith, but from an implementation point of view. 

Keith Seymour: Yeah, absolutely. I think is a real move towards digitalization. And I think most of our clients now probably have digital strategies that are completely central in core to their agenda. So, they're much more open to digital alternatives and to things like mail and print and records as you've answered, than they would have been even five years ago, because all of that now plays into the digital experience for their own customers. I think what we saw during the COVID pandemic five years ago, and those office shutdowns, is the customers who had a forward thinking digital strategy, they coped so much better. And then they were the ones putting emergency measures and sticking plastic solutions in place. And they continue to do business in the usual way and then support their customers. I think digitization is seen as central to business continuity now in a way that it possibly wasn't, not even five years ago. But I think probably the biggest thing is that all of us as customers are much more digitally demanding than we were. And then that gets kind of reflected by the legislation that comes through. 

So, a couple of examples of that are things like the pension dashboards program. There's real pressure on, for example, pension providers to standardize and cleanse their data to align with that program, which they've got a legal obligation to do. And it's obviously much easier to do that digitally than when you've got warehouses full of paper and tapes and microfiche, and those kinds of traditional methods. 

I think another good example in the UK is the NHS, because they set themselves up with some really challenging targets. I think it was 90 % of trusts needed to be having digital patient records by this year. And then that meant a big push on implementing new systems and scanning and things. And I think once people get used to using things like the NHS app, and being able to see things like their medical history in one place, right? And all of the benefits and the convenience that the kind of digital world gives you, then they're just much less accepting of analog systems and of paper systems and of disjointed systems. 

Siobhan King: Yeah, and I think the other thing that the other part of your question that you asked Miguel, that we haven't addressed is about the barriers to digitization. And I think for me, one of the biggest barriers is not understanding what you've got is a huge barrier, because honestly, going back to what you were saying, Keith, about Raiders of the Lost Ark, and there being like warehouses and warehouses and boxes and boxes of paper, you can't possibly digitize it all. You need to be able to understand what you've got at offsite and what the usage patterns are and what are the things that people are going to need most constantly so you can start to set priorities.  

And if you don't understand what you've got in terms of the record types that you've got and the way the business is using them, then you're really going to struggle to start a digitization process. I know Keith, you've got scan on demand, even that is going to be a little bit hard for you to do. 

And that's often the first step we take when we work with a lot of our clients on looking at their information governance or records management program. It often starts with a discovery exercise to understand the profile of what their records landscape looks like, as well as how is the business using records and what are the business objectives and business needs and requirements that need to be addressed. 

Host: Both of you mentioned that the pandemics changed the perspective of the customers regarding digitization and records management. But I would like to know currently, today, are digital records given the same value as physical records under client eyes? 

Siobhan King: Okay, I've got quite a strong opinion about this because I have to say that our clients either value or don't value their paper records or digital records equally. So, if there's a problem I tend to find with their paper records, then there's going to be a problem with the digital records. And I think the reason for that is because they're not looking at paper records and digital records as part of the whole ecosystem. 

They're kind of treating them as if they're completely different things. And that mentality means that there are a lot of things that fall between the cracks. And we've worked with a client where they're doing things like having born digital records and then printing them out and then putting them in boxes and then sending them to offsite storage.  

Things like that start to occur and you start to identify why the people in the organization are printing things out. It's because they don't understand how to use the digital record system. So, there's a big governance gap there. There's just one example of how when you don't think of it as a whole, you miss a lot of issues that you've got in both paper and digital records management. 

Keith Seymour: Yeah, I think that's completely true. I think that the format shouldn't really reflect the value, they're not really linked. But there are things that people can do in order to kind of level up, if you like, the value that they place on digital and physical records. And one example is getting certification to the British standard BS 10008 accreditation. So that's the standard for ensuring legal admissibility of electronically stored information. So that's a globally recognized standard and that can go a long way in terms of building confidence in digital records.  

Sometimes, a lot of people think things like BS 10000 is about the quality of the image, and it's about kind of how the clarity of the scan and the kind of metadata that you take with that. But it's not about that at all. It's really about the life cycle management of a digital record and being able to prove this is the best and most authentic version of that particular record, and that it's the only version and having those controls in place.  

If you take those steps and those measures and comply with accreditations like that, then you can have just as much confidence in your digital records as your physical files.  

Now, some things will need to be physical. There are things like deeds and certain legal agreements and legal documents that need to be physical, but it's probably less that needs to be physical than people realize and probably more options open to them kind of digitally than they realize. 

Siobhan King: And can I add to that about, so you talked about the digitization process and the digitization, the legal admissibility standard. But also, there needs to be confidence in the record keeping systems that you're using for managing your digital records. And again, there are standards in place that you can use to ensure that your systems are robust and that you can trust the records that are kept within those systems. 

So, it's about having things like audit trails, having clear permissions set up within those systems and ensuring the integrity of the records that are kept in the systems. 

“And we actually have a term in records management for some of the stuff that you've got. We call it ROT, which I quite like as an analogy for digital trash. And so ROT is actually an acronym. R is for redundant, O is for obsolete, and T is for trivial. And the truth is that so much of the stuff that we're dealing with on a daily basis is actually ROT. 

Having good governance in the form of having some form of retention policy in place can help you to then start to sift through and say, these are things we need to keep for a certain amount of time because we need to comply with our legal obligations or protect our rights. These are the things that we don't need to keep". - Shioban King

Host: I would like to change the main topic a little bit and reintroduce an idea that I mentioned in the introduction. Well, according to data from the Data Never Sleeps reports by Domo, a cloud solution company, in 2022, every minute of every day, almost 6 million Google searches were made. 66,000 photos were uploaded to Instagram, nearly 350.000 tweets were posted and even 230 million emails were sent. It's what we call digital trash, which also affects companies for sure. What about this issue? How a policy of saving everything could become a problem and how to solve that? 

Siobhan King: Okay, so I have to say, this is actually a really old problem and it's been around for a long time. I think the issue is that it is growing exponentially, particularly with the growth of AI, which requires yet more and more more data to be accumulated. And I have to agree with you that the idea of keeping everything is problematic. 

it's not only problematic because of the cost, which is the obvious thing that we talk about in terms of service space, but it's also just very difficult for you to manage all of that information and actually get to the answers that you need to get to when you're just trying to do your job. If you've got so much basically noise and the information to noise ratio is just too much for your staff or your colleagues to deal with, then that's actually going to start to eat into their time and their efficiency at doing their job.  

I think it comes back to what we were talking about around when we're talking about the paper versus the digital and about understanding the value of the records that you have. And there's a value in terms of retention, in terms of some things like the deeds that we were talking about, have long-term value. You need to keep certain records because they prove the rights that your organization has, or they prove that you have fulfilled legal obligations that you need to, or they are proving that you have met compliance regulations. But there are other records that are of very, very short-term value.  

But a lot of the kind of material that you were talking about in the data trash report is a lot of that ephemeral stuff because it often relates to your marketing activities and other things like that where you only really need to keep that sort of thing for a very short amount of time. 

And we actually have a term in records management for some of the stuff that you've got. We call it ROT, which I quite like as an analogy for digital trash. And so ROT is actually an acronym. R is for redundant, O is for obsolete, and T is for trivial. And the truth is that so much of the stuff that we're dealing with on a daily basis is actually ROT. 

Having good governance in the form of having some form of retention policy in place can help you to then start to sift through and say, these are things we need to keep for a certain amount of time because we need to comply with our legal obligations or protect our rights. These are the things that we don't need to keep. And those retention rules, there's a  piece about ensuring you know what they are, ensuring all of your people know what they are so that they can say manage their inboxes on a daily basis or their OneDrive. There's also a piece about integrating those rules into your digital systems where your records are kept.  

And that's the kind of thing that Metataxis works with a lot of our clients on is in helping to say a common platform that a lot of people use is Microsoft has a compliance tool called Purview, which allows you to develop retention labels, which you can then automatically apply if you've got your classification and categorization of records set up well to the information that you've got in SharePoint, in OneDrive, and even in Outlook.  

So I think having a regular and routine disposal program in place to help you get rid of all of that rot can really help you partly address the cost but also address that digital overload problem that you might have. 

Keith Seymour: I think also one of the things that led to the growth of digital trash and that kind of things getting out of hand is cloud storage. I think people say it's in the cloud and it's almost like a license to save everything. But as we all know, there's a physical reality behind the cloud. I think data center energy usage will double in the next couple of years, according to most research. And as Siobhan says, then once you bring AI into the mix and you start applying that to everything you've got. It's just the demands for energy, for storage, for cooling … they're going to get out of hand quite quickly. So, their companies absolutely need to have to control their electronic files and be able to review and delete them when the time comes. I think part of the problem or part of this was caused by putting temporary digital processes in place. And, just to reference COVID again, I think poor digital practices probably peaked during that time. Cause I think access took precedence over process, and it was a little bit of short-term thinking. So instead of having things like a proper digital mail software, or a proper electronic document management system, people started scanning and attaching PDFs to emails, and then suddenly everything's uncontrolled and there's multiple versions of the same thing. And then local storage, cloud storage … no control over authenticity, no ability to be able to prove that you're actually compliant with things like GDPR, and you are deleting things when you should,  because who knows how many other versions there are of the same files. 

I think we're probably a little better at stopping the physical trash, even though I still think there's probably how many thousands boxes of shoes, tennis rackets, brochures from the 1980s. That's that in boxes that people are paying storage for month after month. But I think we need to have a real mindset change and be just as strict when it comes to the digital trash. 

Host: Regarding the obligations on this topic, mean the compliance, what about compliance? How can businesses balance compliance with operational efficiencies? 

Siobhan King: It's probably obvious what I think about this… I think it that often compliance is pitted against operational efficiency as if it's a zero-sum game and you can only have one winner. But really, I don't think that's completely fair. I think often records management and information governance doesn't just help you address your compliance needs. It can also improve your business efficiency. 

We were talking about some examples before around the impact of having digital overload has on your colleagues and staff when they're trying to work on a daily basis. 

I think that there's an opportunity for records and information governance to improve the efficiency and the streamline your processes and get them down to what the bare minimum is that you need to be able to comply, but also to be able to work effectively. And I think that sort of thing actually improves people's daily lives because it's less time, sifting through loads and loads of information to try to find the one insight that you're hoping is the right thing.  

Or to have confidence in the decisions that you're making as a business, because what if you're basing that on old data or old information that is no longer relevant? Like the versions, Keith, you're talking about, what if you've picked up the wrong document and you're using different versions? 

And so when we work with clients, we get called in. Sometimes their focus is compliance and they're saying, we want to improve our information governance so that we can improve our accountability. And along the way, we find improvements to their processes. Sometimes we are asked to look at things around their information architecture, which is a fancy way of saying, how do they structure their information?  

And as we're going, we address compliance. So it's never really a one thing or the other for us when we're working with clients. We tend to be looking at the two things at the same time. 

Host: Okay. I have another question regarding, well, at the end we are always coming back to the pandemics. But at the end, the situation has changed dramatically. mean, there are a lot of people working from home, different workplace environments, et cetera. And I would like to know from the records management perspective, how are these new trends, these workplace trends such as hybrid working, et cetera, how are they impacting on the records management space? 

Siobhan King: So to go back to what Keith was saying earlier about the pandemic, about that rush to address the immediate problem, that is exactly what we saw, particularly with the adoption of Microsoft Teams, which a lot of organizations wore as their answer to an online collaborative platform that allows you to have meetings and keep records and do all sorts of things. 

And in that rush, yeah, Keith, you're absolutely right. People were concerned about getting the VPN set up and making sure that the security was right and the permissions were right and that everybody could access it and that teams were working. They didn't really think about how they were going to structure the team sites. And we've seen quite a bit of sprawl in this area. Like, people have got mountains of team sites all over the place, not really clear on what their purpose is and what, you know, who should be involved. We're hearing our clients' staff complaining that they've got hundreds of teams that they're members of and they don't know why they're there…. So, it really is a lack of information governance that we're seeing in a records management and information governance space now that that's have been happening for a couple of years. 

People are starting to come to us to ask, how do we rein this in, and how do we manage this better? So there's a lot of remediation that needs to happen of how do we deal with all of this stuff that you've got in the old environment, which was developed in a rather uncontrolled and organic kind of way. And how do we develop maybe a target operating model for you to be able to move to, which is much more structured and much more easy and simple to follow.  

So definitely sprawl is one of the things that we've seen. But also I'm thinking of at least one client where the transition from paper to digital was quite abrupt and they're still struggling with how do we deal with the fact that people were working from home during the pandemic.  

And there's this post-custodial thing where the organization's paper records are now sitting in people's homes. And it's around, again, governance and making sure that there are clear guidelines for your people around what you should be doing with any paper that you had from before the pandemic.  

But also, providing solutions to your people about, so I've got these boxes, what should I be doing with them? And making it clear to them, this is a process and yeah, Keith, digitization is part of that in terms of having a clear digitization process and ensuring that that is well managed as part of it. 

Keith Seymour: Absolutely. I think that's true. I think also with hybrid working, there's a kind of a real estate angle to it. You know, I think people are in the office less often, the companies need less space and now a few years down the line, there's kind of lease break opportunities roll around. We've so many of our clients are undertaking some big real estate projects. So they're either moving and typically moving means kind of downsizing, you know, all their kind of subletting flaws and their refurbishing. I think the research that's out there from people like Leesman and JLL show that nearly half of globally are going to reduce their space over the next few years.

So, this is a trend that isn't a temporary thing. And I think the net result for that, for kind of those of us in the service industry, is that the space for services and the space for storage is very low priority in the new building plan, if you know what mean. So, anything that we can do around digitization or doing things offsite is going to massively help to kind of help people to realize this kind of smaller office footprint world.  

And I think the second thing is, as Siobhan's just said, people are working from home and they used to be able to just call a box of files back from an onsite store or from a warehouse. But then once things are going to people's houses, that's a different scenario from a kind of a cost,  of even a cost of courier point of view. And then also the sort of data security issues you get of having people with sensitive client files and the life around the house.  

So I think that's led to both a demand for and then an acceptance of digital records. So we're seeing things like scan on demand, as Siobhan said, that is becoming maybe the norm in the hybrid world or certainly as common as kind of the traditional box retrievals that we were seeing. 

Host: I think it is fair to say at this point of the conversation of the episode that information governance has become a critical focus for businesses today, but it will be great to know what are the essential principles that organizations should follow to ensure that the data is secure and accessible and certainly properly managed. 

Siobhan King: I see this as a people issue as much as a technology issue. So, there has been a tendency in the past to think of, you know, records management as, we'll just get a bit of it and that will do all the management for us. But really you need to have your governance in place and that needs to be integrated from C-suite level right down to the people who are doing the operational side of things.  

And accountability is absolutely key. There's no point in having a whole load of policies and controls in place for your security and for your attention if there's no one to check up to make sure that it's being done. For me, accountability of information governance is very important. It's the area that we see where information governance programs are not performing or even failing, it tends to be because there's a lack of accountability, there's no monitoring, there's no reporting.  

And I've got one more thing to say as well, is when you have an information governance program in place, it's important to get that balance of roles right. So, you need to make things happen, you need to have a group of people who are responsible for making decisions, and they need to make those decisions in a timely manner.  

And they need to, again, be accountable to someone ultimately at the top at C-suite level. And then underneath that, you need to have a group of people who are responsible for making things happen, for ensuring that the operations are working. If you lack either one of those things, nothing's going to happen.  

I think that's where SPS and Metataxis is actually dovetail nicely. Because Metataxis is looking at the governance perspective and looking at that decision-making perspective of things. Whereas I feel like SPS works much more on the implementation level and making sure that the operations are in line with the expectations.

"You can have the best policies and procedures in the world, but if people don't know where they are, don't access them, don't use them, then they're kind of meaningless." - Keith Seymour

Keith Seymour: Yeah, think what you said about accountability is key to me. If you as a client have got responsibility for records management, I think you're responsible for the systems you bring into place. You're responsible for making sure that all of those records support the core function of the business. You're responsible for the services, whether that's offsite providers or outsourced teams on site or wherever it might be. But most of all, as Shioban said, you're responsible for the accountability and the responsibility.  

You can have the best policies and procedures in the world, but if people don't know where they are, don't access them, don't use them, then they're kind of meaningless. So, it does all come down to their kind of accountability and making sure that all of that is front of mind. I think another good approach here is if you start with a risk and have a really good risk assessment process. So if you're looking  at, whether that's risk of theft or loss or unauthorized access or inaccuracies or information or data transfer risks or information security risk….. If you kind of start from there and then you mitigate and think, okay, what is the risk here? How can we mitigate it? What is the process? Does the process support that kind of working almost from a worst case scenario kind of backwards? It can be a kind of certainly a robust approach in terms of making sure that you don't have problems down the line. 

Host: Okay, well, at this point, we're just coming to the final question, which is looking ahead, how do you see the future of information management evolving, especially with the growing reliance of AI and automation in data processing? 

Siobhan King: So yeah, so AI I think is quite promising both for our colleagues who are using records on a daily basis, but also for the practitioners because we've talked about digital trash and rot and the fact that we've got these growing numbers of information and records that we need to be able to categorize and so that we can apply controls to them, ensure they're secure and retained for the right amount of time. But there's just so much of it. And there's no way one human being or even a team of human beings - believe me, I've tried,-  can review all of that stuff. And that's where AI has the promise to maybe help us out, break the back of some of that hard work around at least doing maybe a first level, second level SIFT , to be able to identify what is this and therefore what is the value of it? Can we get rid of it? There is of course a need, I've mentioned it as a SIFT, so I think there's going to be a human element to say,” okay, we'll look at the results of the SIFT and say, right, okay, this is the decision that we need to make for this, or this is the decision that we need to make for that”. 

I think that there's promise for AI to potentially help us as records managers to deal with all of this ROT that we have to analyze in some way.  

Keith Seymour: Absolutely. I think, we're also seeing our customers already using things like advanced data analytics to run retention and destruction reports. These things used to take days and days and manual lookups and cross-referencing. And these things can now be done in minutes. And then customers are able to confidently dispose and stop paying for materials at the earliest possible time. But I think that, to me, the main change from AI and it's kind of mainly what Siobhan spoke about, is around accessibility and then information retrieval. But when you think about all of the data that you have in a record repository and how most of that is completely unstructured, the ability to intelligently search through that content, use context and nuance and bring in those extra prompts and rules that Siobhan was talking about, understand different terminology, that changes everything. 

But it needs to be digital, right? You can't throw all of this AI kind of at a warehouse full of boxes. And whereas when we talked about barriers earlier, and a big barrier will always be cost, right? And often the cost of a huge discovery in a scanning project versus long-term storage, often the balance isn't where it needs to be for people to kind of take the decision to do that. But actually, I think it might be that the value of that data that you can unlock through AI suddenly that as a game changer in terms of the return of investment. And I think,  in the next couple of years, I think we're going to see that start to trigger digitization projects probably at a scale that we haven't seen before. 

Host:  Okay, perfect. Well, that's a wrap for today's episode. Huge thanks to Chauvin and Keith for being with us and breaking down what records management really looks like in today's world. Thank you.