Typically, each organization has the definition of a record to serve their
legal, statutory or regulatory requirements and business needs that extend
outside of those requirements.  This definition should be included in your
policy.

While most "record definitions" are quite clear to those of us who have
been around records much of our professional careers, for people that do
other things most of the day and create records but don't consider  them as
such, the language we use may as well be Esperanto.

In our case, we have a formal definition in our policy and procedures for
our records liaisons, but we also provide that, along with a much simpler
definition in more plain business type language, giving examples of
documents, reports, etc that people normally produce in the course of their
roles in daily business that ARE records.

This works well for office type documents, but not as well for the 600 lb.
gorilla in the room... email.  The easiest thing to do here is design
training for various business functions, identify the primary types of
email messages they receive (by role) that satisfy the definition of a
record for their function, then setup folders that match those
"categories", and encourage them to drag the messages into the folders
after they write and send or open and read them.  Retention rules can be
set for each of those folders, and anything left in either the in or out
box will be handled as 'transitory' or non-record, and automatically
deleted in 180 days.

While some people may think this is unmanageable, everyone opens emails and
HAS TO DO something with them, so how hard is it to simply drag it to a
folder if they need/want to retain it?  I've been doing this for 3 years
now, and one interesting thing is how small the volume of email is that is
a record... in my case, it's 5%.  That includes committee work, personnel
actions, financial decisions, training, etc.  Think about how much your
organization could reduce storage costs if EVERY employee were to reduce
the email they save by 90-95%.

Hope this gives you some ideas

Larry
[log in to unmask]

On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 6:31 PM, Madeleine Manoukian <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> One of the most challenging issue in training people to file their records
> in the electronic records management system is getting them to determine
> "what is a record"
>
> I would appreciate any advice or guidelines that you have used in your
> training and from your experience were effective.
>
> Thank you
>
> Madeleine Manoukian
>



-- 
*Lawrence J. Medina
Danville, CA
RIM Professional since 1972*

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