> From: "Jones, Virginia" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Vital Records
>
> Remember to have one overall Vital Records Schedule for use during  
> and immediately following an emergency event.  The subject matter  
> experts may not be available at that time, and RIM will be  
> considered the expert substitute.  My personal belief is that  
> Records practitioners (whatever our job title) are responsible for  
> the information/records to be available when needed.  We make policy  
> and develop procedures to insure this is so.  Making sure vital  
> records are protected, accessible, and easily restored after an  
> incident is part of that duty.


Making sure vital records are protected...................

Well, that always seems to be the rub for many records management  
programs. If you ask the person charged with records management how  
are you protecting your vital records, typically you would receive a  
blank stare as an answer.

Then they tell you that IT actually has a program for protecting the  
records.  Or they talk about offsite storage as their methodology of  
creating redundant records.  But when you ask how they impose or  
enforce that, again the blank stare.

If you declare that certain records are "Vital" and then have no  
program of protection then I would argue you are more negligent than a  
company that has no classification and just supposes that IT is  
protecting everything.

But the CIO or IT Manager is not protecting records, they merely  
create back up tapes for disaster recovery purposes.  They fail to  
even recognize there is a "records content" to what they do.  Virtual  
tape and therefore virtual records and Cloud Storage eliminate any  
ability to provide a true data mapping component for litigation  
purposes.  They don't even see a problem here.

They would argue, my tapes are stored offsite in a vault. Are records  
stored offsite in a vault?  Well we know that answer.

When I started exhibiting at ARMA 25 years ago I thought records  
managers were the guardians of the vital records.  In reality, we  
build vaults for the IT side at a 10 to 1 ratio compared with records  
management being involved in the protection of vital records. In 1970  
that number would have been 25 to 1 in the opposite side.  Every major  
company had a vault for their vital records. (Corporate minutes,  
insurance policies, corporate charters,  the business plan, accounting  
records, human resource files, supply chain and marketing data, tax  
records and so on.)

Recent legislation has hammered home the need for records management  
but the practice is totally counter to the way you would think it  
would evolve. Somehow records protection and records management have  
been separated at birth.  I sell more vaults than ever but the person  
signing the order is totally different than you would expect.

In many of Peter's RAIN articles that discuss court cases, there is  
always the "WHHOOAAA Moment". As in "Whoa, I was supposed to protect  
that!" Whoa, I wasn't allowed to delete those emails!" "Whoa, you want  
a data map! How am I supposed to figure that out?"

In 1970 there were no Whoa moments.  Those were the days my  
friend........  Wait! That sounds like a song lyric.  (  "We thought  
they'd never end. We'd sing and dance forever and a day. We'd live the  
life we choose. We'd fight and never lose. Those were the  
days.........." )

So how do you protect your vital records?  No blank stares, please!


Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
[log in to unmask]
(610)  756-4440    Fax (610)  756-4134
WWW.FIRELOCK.COM

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