At this year’s e-Records conference, we hosted Access Science’s Lisa Cromwell and Amelia Johnson who showed us how to use assessments to engage our organizations. Both stressed the need to continually reassess business operations in an open empathetic way.  Assessments are more than just surveys – those can be helpful – but what is really needed is face to face interaction with staff. The most successful assessments are going to include regular in person meetings. This way, enthusiasm can be gauged and the approach of the assessors can be re-calibrated accordingly.

Five takeaways:

1. Find a common understanding with the folks being assessed. If staff do not know why an assessment is being conducted, they will not participate in a meaningful way.
2. Take a holistic view of the assessment. Rather than narrowly focus on one area of operations, look at the entirety of operations effected by the assessment.
3. Find the root and make it real. Is a new or old technology causing the operation breakdown? Could leadership be an issue? Make sure you know what you are dealing with before making your move.
4. Build on what is working well. The beauty of assessments is not only discovering faults in operations, but also finding out what is working. Use existing success as a foundation for any changes wrought by the assessment.
5. Establish rapport and reserve judgement. In other words, be nice. Credentials don’t matter when trust isn’t established.

PDF of Presentation

In the afternoon, we were treated to Catapult Systems’ Tim Cone and Reza Dorrani who provided us with a demo of Sharepoint and Microsoft 365 Electronic Document Management System capabilities. For various reasons, workplaces are becoming more and more digital. Millennial employees demand and expect it – and they are going to make up the majority of the workforce in just a few years. One of Catapult’s specialties is helping companies and governments implement Microsoft products. They walked us through a few functionalities of Microsoft’s 365 Cloud system.

Some takeaways:

1. When all records are stored in the cloud, control of those records can be absolute. Thus, document labels become even more powerful. Sensitivity Labels can be used to apply and enforce data protection policies. Say, you have records with personally identifiable information such as a Social Security numbers. You can set a policy that will recognize the SS numbers automatically and protects those documents against unauthorized access.
2. Something similar can be done with Retention Labels. You can set the retention period for a record or class of records on the date of creation. You can set up a review process and will be notified when a record or class of records has met retention.

Bottom line: moving completely to the Cloud is a big step. There is no reset button. Electronic Document Management Systems will change the way your office works if you’re not already using one. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither should your Cloud environment. Consider following a value based approach to cloud migration – identifying what business operations are most valuable and starting with those. Microsoft 365 offers a whole suite of applications to choose from: be picky.

PDF of Presentation