Records Management is for Everyone

I can actually remember when I first heard about Iron Mountain thinking that there was an actual mountain somewhere, probably in West Virginia, with enormous Bat-like caves filled with row upon row of shelves filled to the top with clean, clearly marked boxes of paper.  Bear in mind, that was nearly thirty years ago, and I’ve learned a lot since then.  But, Iron Mountain is one of those companies, like Xerox and IBM, that has become synonymous with the very concept behind the services it provides, in this case, records storage.

Of course, a lot has changed in thirty years, and Iron Mountain (as well as Xerox and IBM) have changed as well.  Still, the “stickiness” of the concepts behind the companies remains.  Thus, you will be hard pressed to attend a seminar on records management without hearing Iron Mountain mentioned at least once, not as a company, but as an idea: the storage of paper records off-site by a third party vendor.  In the e-discovery space, records storage seems like a quaint, old-fashioned idea that doesn’t have a great deal of relevance to what we do every day.  After all, we deal with information systems, knowledge management and collaborative environments.

Records management, after all, is about real estate.  You can only store so many records in so many square feet of file cabinets.  Eventually, you have to send those records that are not accessed routinely off to some lower cost-per-square-foot location.  But, if you are going to send records off-site that you might need to access in the future, then you had better catalog those records so that you can find them.  Thus, the records management discipline was born, and it has since matured into a profession backed by decades of practical experience in organizing information.

Computer memory, on the other hand, was cheap.  You could store increasingly large volumes of computer records in increasingly smaller boxes, so no one really worried too much about managing the information in those boxes.  The IT imperatives were access and uptime, letting the users decide how to organize the data.  And organize we did.  Unfortunately, we all did it a little differently because, unlike records management professionals, we were making it up as we went.  But, all of a sudden, we realized that cheap memory is a relative thing – one gigabyte is pretty cheap, but multiple petabytes translates into real money.  Then the lawyers arrived, wanting to find all of the records in these mixed use repositories filled to the brim with information, both useful and not, that pertain to a specific issue.  Cheap wasn’t even in the vocabulary any more.

So, the wheel turns, and now we would like to manage the electronically stored information that we finally realize are, in fact, records that need to be managed.  The good news is that your friendly neighborhood records manager is still in business, and has a lot of very good, practical knowledge to share.  Smart companies are turning to these professionals and the organizations that support them, such as ARMA International and AIIM, to help guide the transformation to managed information.  Leveraging tools such as ARMA’s Information Management Maturity Model™, companies are beginning to treat electronic records like, well, records.  And that is a good thing for everyone.  Because, as folks have been preaching for a number of years now, if you manage your information well in the first place, everything downstream (identification, preservation, collection, processing, review and production) will all be easier and less costly.  So, it really doesn’t matter where you currently sit – legal, IT or business operations – records management is your business.

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