Laura,

Congratulations on expanding your scope of services. It shows that you and your staff are flexible and it also provides your staff with additional growth opportunities.

I think, however, that you want to do your best to define a scope of responsibilities that fits what has been added to your plate. It is certainly not unusual for a records management team to also do other document capture activities. Often, these activities are paper to electronic conversion efforts, but collecting and storing images, video, and audio are akin. The good news is that this allows you consistency in naming and filing conventions and the ability to electronically associate these records with the matter that they relate to. You can also then enforce consistent media formats, resolution, frame rates, and audio bit rates to ensure consistent and high quality multimedia files.

I would suggest that you should also look at adding computer forensics and e-discovery services, if those are needed services for your firm. This would be potentially a profit center for your group and the right hire may add significant "geekiness" to your team.

The system administration tasks and governance activities are good things to focus on.

What you do want to be careful about is getting into hardcore IT services. Building and maintaining databases and more advanced help desk services can become real sinkholes. While you may have a great person who can do this stuff for you, you may find yourself at a point in the future where that person leaves for greener pastures and you can't find similar qualifications to replace that person. Your IT people will then hate you when they have to take on a bunch of stuff that they never built and likely don't understand. IT security requires specialists, as does computer networking, IMHO. So I would suggest defining your group within the realm of data and document collection and preservation, with an over-riding focus on information management, and that should encompass most of what you do. By adding the more technically aligned computer forensics, you provide your people with a higher end career path for the more technically inclined. By staying away
 from hardcore IT services, you enable those folks to have other career paths within the firm that they are more suited for.

What you can end up with is a team that has capture and indexing clerks in the entry level areas (with those folks exposed to both paper and electronic capture), some mid-level system admins and indexing experts, and then top end folks divided into the governance team and the forensics team. Clearly, you won't have a lot of top end folks, but you have some pathways for the technical and non-technical staff. What you also do is clearly define the basic and repeatable collection and preservation tasks that can be easily outsourced if the firm would go in that direction. Your more senior people have clearly defined skill roles and you continue to be able to provide some growth opportunities that don't involve people having to wait for you to leave the firm.

 Patrick Cunningham, CRM
[log in to unmask]


"Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier." 
-- Colin Powell

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
To unsubscribe from this list, click the below link. If not already present, place UNSUBSCRIBE RECMGMT-L or UNSUB RECMGMT-L in the body of the message.
mailto:[log in to unmask]