Taming the Beast

Corporate law departments acknowledge the need to manage and control this unabated and explosive growth of digital information, yet understand that the traditional approach will not work. In the past, the responsibility for creating and implementing an organization's records management program has typically fallen to the records manager, with support from the corporate law department for certain activities such as approving the company records retention schedule. Records management programs focused primarily on paper records management. Now, with information ever growing and primarily in digital format, most organizations acknowledge that a different approach needs to be taken.

Compounding the problem are regulatory and privacy issues. There are thousands of regulations, both in the United States and abroad, that affect recordkeeping and require research and compliance. Further, there is no single set of global data privacy criteria, and laws outside the U.S. ' particularly in the E.U. ' are more stringent. In addition, business units within a single company may have very different information management needs and have developed their own policies and procedures, often in contradiction of one another. Resolving these issues, including the immediate need for institutional policy consistency, as well as the exceptionally complex aspects of policy implementation across all electronic repositories, seems a Herculean task.