This is the fourth post of a multi-part recap of the 2017 e-Records Conference. Presentation materials from the conference are available on the e-Records 2017 website.
- Information Governance: Take Control and Succeed
- The Public Information Act and Updates from the 85th Legislative Session
- TSLAC Wants Your Electronic Records
- Establishing Information Governance for Local Governments in Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365
Alexander Webb and Julia Johnson waiting to present at this years e-Records Conference.
In a presentation at this year’s conference, Alexander Webb and Julia Johnson from the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Cap Metro) showed us how to apply Information Governance to a SharePoint implementation. Mr. Webb and Ms. Johnson used the ARMA Principles® as framework for the SharePoint system, which were created by ARMA International to provide a standard of conduct for governing information within organizations. There are eight Principles® which can be easily remembered by this mnemonic: A.T.I.P.C.A.R.D. – Accountability, Transparency, Integrity, Protection, Compliance, Availability, Retention, and Disposition. To learn more about the Principles visit ARMA International Principles.
Here are a few key points for each principle as they were given in the presentation.
- Accountability – Delegation of responsibilities for the management of information.
- Plan, plan, plan and document, document, document, everything.
- Involve your stakeholders in your Information Governance Plan.
- Decide upfront whether to use On Premises SharePoint or Office 365 SharePoint.
- Develop your site structure, determine permissions and include in policies.
- Transparency – Ensure organizations’ business processes and activities are documented and verifiable.
- Train everyone.
- Continue training users, site owners, and new staff.
- Integrity – Guarantee authenticity and reliability.
- When moving records between libraries in SharePoint, the integrity of the document could be altered.
- Establish a clear version policy; too many versions can bog down the site.
- Develop quality assurance and control standards.
- Protection – Ensure the safety of the organization’s information.
- Permissions are a great way to safeguard the confidentiality of records.
- Document your permissions and include a clear hierarchy of security.
- Compliance – Comply with laws, requirements, and statues.
- Stakeholder involvement is required as the Subject Matter Experts (SME’s).
- To ensure compliance, perform an audit on the system.
- Set up retention rules in SharePoint.
- Establish Content Types that are flexible.
- Create ways to track the information that is added to the system and provide regulatory reporting.
- Availability – Ensure timely, efficient and accurate retrieval of organizations’ information.
- When searching in SharePoint, establish constant naming conventions.
- Run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on PDF documents prior to loading into the system.
- Consult your stakeholders to ensure metadata and naming conventions are accurate.
- Consistency is key.
- Retention – Organizations are responsible for maintaining information in accordance with legal, regulatory, fiscal, operations, and historical requirements.
- Ensure all legal requirements are followed and consult your business units while keeping in mind the record life cycle.
- Select either In-Place Retention or Records Center Retention; using both can become confusing to the users.
- Disposition – Ensure proper disposition for information that is no longer required while in compliance with applicable laws and organizations policies.
- Automatic retention policies in SharePoint do not document before deletions are done.
- A 3rd party tool will be required when documenting the deletion.
- Manual deletion is an option, but if you have thousands of records you might want to invest in a 3rd party tool.
SharePoint Office 365’s “right out of the box” functions and options are geared towards manual processing and can be a cost-effective tool in maintaining your organizations’ records. If you are considering SharePoint for your records storage depository, these points for using the Principles® will hopefully assist you in implementation.
