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From the President- October 2011

February 02, 2012

At conference, we talked quite a bit about having a seat at the table and speaking a common language with your IT and legal counterparts, as well as opening lines of communication with the C-level suite. We talked about how the Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles® (GARP®) are the foundation for this common language. Let’s look at the first two principles and some concrete steps we can take in our organizations to apply them successfully.

Accountability

This principle says you should have a high-level executive overseeing a program. This does not mean an executive is actually going to be a hands-on participant. What you need is management backing. Management has to agree that information governance is important to the organization because it makes it more efficient and mitigates risk. I recommend you form a stakeholder committee that includes senior management from legal, IT, compliance, and other applicable parties. This committee should meet quarterly or at least every six months and set goals and objectives for the organization. Senior management should bless the work and goals. Don’t aim for perfection – as “perfect is often the enemy of the good.” Find your risk tolerance profile and determine the risk/reward ratio using the GARP® Information Governance Maturity Model. Finally, you should pick the most important and impactful areas to address first.

Transparency

How important is transparency to your organization? Are records kept in an auditable fashion? Is the program itself clear and transparent? Would you be able to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request (if you are government) or to a production request during litigation because your organization understands where its information is located? Knowing this information in relation to ALL information is critical. Of course not all organizational information is a record, so do you know what part is? Do you know your organization’s most critical or risky areas? This is again crucial information to obtain. You may use your file plan, knowledge of retention criteria, and knowledge of security and transparency requirements to define goals for this principle. In addition, risk mitigation should come into play. You may want to create a data map, which is a bit different from your IT data map, and to highlight which systems produce various kinds of records, which may be transitory, and where convenience copies are stored. It’s an exercise that will help your IT counterparts learn your language and help IT make better IT governance decisions.

These are just a few tips for working with GARP®. There are many approaches that can be taken, and no single one is the right one. In the next column, we will explore some of the other principles. I invite you to submit questions so I can try to provide you with adequate answers. In addition, take advantage of the recorded sessions from the conference – they are wonderful tools to help you in your mission.

Galina Datskovsky, Ph.D. CRM
President, ARMA International

Galina Datskovsky, Ph.D. CRM