Everyone’s heard of the Three L’s of Real Estate: Location, Location, Location. (Having just sold my house in this lousy market, I can tell you that there’s a lot of truth to that old adage.) I’d like to propose a similar maxim for Records Management. Call it the Three A’s of Records Management: Automate, Automate, Automate.
Automated Records Management significantly reduces a lot of the major problems faced by Records Managers today and can make your life a whole lot easier. Here’s an example, if a document is automatically declared a record after it is approved for publishing, it is not up to the end user to remember to do it. Similarly, if that same record is classified in your organization’s file plan programmatically, you can eliminate the fear of user misclassification.
Automating Records Management is important no matter what solution you are using, SharePoint included. SharePoint comes with some terrific custom workflow functionality that you can use to create some simple workflows to automate Records Management processes. I’m nobody’s developer and I’ve actually been able to create some pretty useful stuff completely on my own.
No matter what your Records Management solution, do what you can to maximize your process automation.
