The missing link
- Article 10 of 26
- M-iD, November 2004
Could a new 'linked in place' approach to records management systems tackle the issue of managing records stored in multiple systems?
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That kind of function is an appealing prospect for records managers, says Mark Fresko, a consultant with Cornwell Management Consultants. “One of the difficulties managers face is that records are scattered across a variety of systems and environments. You may have certain records such as correspondence in a records management system, while you'll almost certainly have financial records in a financial system and personnel records in a human resources system.”
Being able to link into all these content repositories from a records management console, leave the content in place, but apply records management criteria to its access, auditing, deletion and retention would certainly be useful for records management professionals.
Another software supplier embracing that approach is ECM vendor Interwoven. “If you look at our strategy and vision, we have a very specific repository for web content, digital assets and documents,” says Christoph Theisinger, director of technology in Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Interwoven. “All of these repositories offer unique features for their respective contents. It makes sense to unify those repositories not on a storage or technology level, but on a level higher: at the metadata level.”
But by leaving records in systems other than a records management repository, organisations face several challenges: what if the other repositories do not have the capabilities, such as record locking and security, to support either records management in general or the capabilities required by the particular records management system implemented; what if they allow users to bypass the commands sent by the records management system; what if the records management system cannot instruct the other repositories?
Adrian Foote, a marketing manager at Vignette who joined the company when it acquired document and records management specialist Tower Technology, agrees that the 'linked in place' approach can be problematic. “You run into all sorts of issues once you look at the detail. If you record in an SAP system an insurance policy that needs to be kept for 75 years, what happens when the system needs upgrading? That record must be moved to a new version and kept in another system, so you've a transfer problem immediately,” he says.
A second issue, according to Foote, is security. He argues that, in his example, standard SAP security is no longer appropriate for dictating who can access records: it has to be a records management-level security policy that dictates who has access to records. So the SAP system has to be modified to ask the records management console who is allowed to ask for the information. “To do that, the console has to understand SAP logins and who can log into the system. Once you start doing that with all your business systems and looking at the problems of upgrading from one business system to another, transferring records from one system to another, it really becomes quite a difficult approach to managing records,” he says. Moving the records into a central archive is therefore a much easier and more workable method to implement for many organisations, he adds.
There are a number of other challenges associated with trying to manage records in diverse repositories. For example, the ability to lock down all the records to make them unalterable or undeletable. This will need to be done with permissions, but another application built on top of the repository might bypass them.
Tracy Caughell, records management product manager at Open Text, says that there is still some way to go before a 'linked in place' architecture can be implemented. “What we have now is a records management console where you can work out your file plan, retention schedule and metadata. We're working on the lock-down of records in other repositories, but it's difficult for us to work through all these issues.”
Faced with the obstacles of integrating with other repositories, some vendors are choosing to take a pragmatic approach to records management architecture. David Gingell, European vice president of marketing at EMC, says that his company supports both a centralised records management repository and distributed repositories in its implementations.
“Some organisations quite like the idea of keeping the records management repository separate, so you have a live repository, decide when a piece of content becomes a record for compliance reasons and then electronically turn that content into a record and put it into the separate records management system. We also point out the benefits of a unified repository. Logically and economically, it makes the most sense. But we bought a company four months ago called Ask Once that allows you to retrieve content from other repositories, not just content management repositories,” he says.
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