April is Records and Information Management (RIM) Month, and it gives us a chance to celebrate the people and processes that keep us all in business.  Led by ARMA International, RIM Month has local ARMA chapters all over the country celebrate by raising awareness of the importance of records and information management through posters, seminars and articles.

In today’s age of information, keeping a handle on the constant flow of knowledge is key to strategy management, research and development, and compliance.   How each organization manages information and its corporate records can directly affect its ability to compete, comply with regulations, and recover from disaster – in other words, to operate efficiently.

It used to be that when people heard the term “records management,” they thought about medical records or files stacked high in the basement.  The reality is that records are now in a variety of formats and touch every employee within an organization. Records include:

• Paper in files, such as contracts, notes, brochures and reports

• Electronic communication such as e-mails, attachments and instant messages

• Web content such as website copy and social media (blogs, tweets and Facebook)

• Databases and customer records

As our economy becomes more dependent on knowledge workers, the importance of RIM only grows.  Per ARMA International:

• The ARMA International Records & Information Management Survey (February 2009) found that 61% of organizations do not monitor employee adoption and adherence to records and information management policies and procedures.
• Many organizations do not formally train all of their employees on managing records and information – including the handling of sensitive data, which indicates that too many top executives don’t fully comprehend the risk and that information is a critical corporate asset.
• With records management processes in place, organizations can perform better in all aspects of business. Less time is spent on searching for research or customer information, files do not take up expensive square footage, e-mail inboxes are organized, and operations run more smoothly. This equals time, money, and frustration saved within the organization and makes more available the resources needed for expansion and growth.
• In recent years, large companies such as CVS, Phillip Morris, Morgan Stanley, and UBS Warburg have lost millions of dollars in fines and sanctions due to poor management of their information.
• The collapse of organizations such as Enron, caused largely by the mismanagement of information, led to the creation of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002, which is now a mandatory practice for all organizations big or small. Soon after SOX came the December 2006 amendments to The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. These rules focused mainly on the management of e-mail and e-discovery, proving once again just how costly improper management can be for any organization.

Learn more about the critical role that RIM plays in driving business success by visiting ARMA or contact us at Cadence Group with your questions.

Image by: Alexander Kharchenko at ©Depositphotos.com