An
independent article on the reasons why common naming makes common sense.
March 2003
A File By Any Other Name …
“What’s in a name”, Shakespeare once asked. “Everything” seems to be today’s answer. Nomenclature, taxonomy, lexicography, cataloguing, classifying – or whatever name is chosen for ‘naming’ (that in itself being paradoxical) – is the cornerstone of records and document management, a key enabler of information and knowledge management.
Information and knowledge management is now one the top 10 initiatives for most corporations. Harvard University suggests that up to 40% of a company’s worth does not appear on their balance sheet. Further, they speculate that most of that 40% resides in information and knowledge.
Every organisation exists to produce a product(s) and/or service(s). The renown economist Adam Smith defined the four fundamental means of production as land, labour, capital and enterprise. Information and knowledge are the enablers of enterprise and are therefore a critical asset to every organisation.
Information and knowledge comprise a single asset class that should be managed holistically. Where that information or knowledge resides (eg: data in an application, records or documents in a warehouse, drawings or plans in a compactus, content in an intranet or knowledge in people’s heads) is unimportant. What matters is the understanding of which information is important to the operation of the organisation and how to access it; knowledge must be actively identified and managed.
University of California research suggests that there is now approximately 250 Megabytes of information for every single person on earth and the figure is going up – in some cases, exponentially. The time to start prioritising and managing your information is now!
The information belonging to organisations is commonly highly fragmented. Finding information spread across the organisation – pulling it from silos and putting it together as a single piece of knowledge is impossible in a fragmented environment. Fragmentation has a number of explicit and potential costs. Fragmentation is both a more subtle, and costly problem than even the volume of information. When you don’t know what you know, at the time you need to know it, even straightforward matters can develop into major crises.
Quality of decision-making is at risk when decisions are not evidence based. When you cannot access all the information you have, decisions are based on incomplete information. Not all decisions will be bad (even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while), it is simply an unnecessary form of corporate risk.
When what is known is unknown to many, your staff can be (and often are) re-inventing the wheel. People replicate others’ work or even work at cross-purposes. This leads to inefficient action of an expensive resource as well as unnecessary errors and worker frustration.
We live in a web of relationships. To have successful relationships, we need to know ourselves and know the other person in the relationship. We cannot have a close trusting relationship with someone when we cannot remember what we learned about them when we last met them. Customers rarely leave you because of your product or process – they leave because they are given no reason to stay. Customers are looking to be remembered and treated as valued individuals and they want product customised to their specific requirements. A ‘corporate memory’ (ie Information and Knowledge Management) is essential to providing customers with those two things.
In an increasingly litigious society, the risk of being forced into legal discovery is ever present and the potential costs of being forced to find fragmented information are huge. Anyone restoring 12 months of network backups to ensure they have all relevant emails and documents knows how costly these events can be. Not being able to do so and having the claimant produce an email you know nothing about can be even more expensive.
Information and knowledge make up the majority of an average organisation’s value that does not appear on the Balance Sheet. If you are not managing information and knowledge you are not managing the full value of your organisation.
Orientation and training for new staff is a high cost item. People leave organisations under many different circumstances. When they do, you typically don’t have the time or resources to sift through their email folders or their filing cabinets, meaning that information is effectively gone. All the information they have in their head is also gone. Without information and knowledge management, your organisation is forced to start relearning it and then teach it to someone else who may also leave.
The HIH and One-Tel debacles of early 2001 have served to highlight the exposure of non-executive directors. Directors are charged with the duty of being aware of issues and problems and dealing with them. Claiming ignorance of the facts is not a defence. Fragmentation of information means even executives often don’t know what’s going on and aren’t “informed”, preventing them from doing the job they’re paid for as well as putting them at risk.
In addition to the value of the knowledge captured and re-used within the organisation, there are considerable legal ramifications to the corporation in regard to the retention of information. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, was signed by President Bush on July 30, 2002. It attempts to address many of the issues raised by the Enron and Arthur Andersen debacles. It emphasises that corporate wrongdoing will not be tolerated. Under the law, anyone who commits mail or wire fraud or certifies false financial reports could get up to 20 years in prison and be fined $5 million. Document shredding could result in a 20-year sentence. Whilst not yet law in Australia there is already murmuring in the halls of parliament as ‘Sarbanes-Oxley” seeps its way into the local vocabulary.
Retention and disposal schedules are required by every business in the corporate and government sectors. These Schedules document the records of the organisation and prescribe the terms for which they must be kept. These terms include the period of retention, acceptable formats, warrants for the decision, appropriate retention and appropriate disposal action. In light of global operations an International Retention Schedule is currently being mooted by ARMA (Association of Record Managers and Administrators International).
In a business world where many companies operate globally the adoption of an International Retention Schedule will be mandatory. For enterprises with their base in the United States, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002, and other corporate reform measures, reinforce the necessity to ensure their records are adequately managed.
Matching domestic management standards with global operations makes good business sense and in a world of acquisitions and mergers, common standards, like common operating systems, makes a company more valuable.
Business and financial values of records will probably not change for the organisation, regardless of the location of their operation. However, for every country in which the organisation operates, the social, historical and legal values will likely be different. Common naming will be key to automated recovery - so a file by any other name may well be lost.
author - Sally McLean
March 2003
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