The Records Management strategy of IBM is to provide a flexible records management tool that addresses the need to maintain all records, in all media, through complete life cycles without requiring organizations to rebuild IT architectures, acquire expensive new hardware, migrate data to single proprietary platforms, or train each employee to use a new desktop software application.

Declaration of Records

Designate that a particular document is a corporate record. Once declared as a corporate record, edit and delete control of the document is passed from the user to the recordkeeping process, as administered by the corporate records management professionals. Once declared as a record, a document can only be modified or deleted by the records management process not by the end user.

At all times, users are aware of which documents are records (have been declared) versus those that are not (not declared). Declaration may be manual or automated.

Manual – user decides when to declare, then sets a property or selects a menu option to declare the document
Automated – the declaration process is automatically triggered when a certain property is set

Classify

Classification is a method of assigning retention rules to documents. An organization will have a common classification scheme for the entire organization, commonly called a File Plan. The file plan is typically a hierarchical set of subjects or business activities.

Each node or subject file is annotated with a unique code called a file code. A given file code refers to a specific subject file within the file plan. Each subject file has an official retention rule (when/why/how to delete) assigned to it. Each document must be assigned a file code that matches the appropriate subject file within the file plan, assigning documents of like subject the appropriate retention rule.

Similar to the Declare function, this can be a manual process or may be process-driven, depending on the particular implementation. The user is presented with a list of allowable file codes from a drop-down list (manual classification).

Searching/Retrieving Documents and Records

Once an electronic document has been declared a record, it can only be deleted or transitioned out via the formal Life Cycle process as operated by the records administrators. A business application or a document management application (such as IBM Content Manager) displays a field setting that clearly indicates those documents that are records (declared) from those that are not.

When a user searches the repository for documents, the application determines which documents the user can view. Before it returns the list back to the user, the application automatically and invisibly conducts a second stage of approval processing. For those declared documents that are in the list, the application consults IBM Records Manager.

IBM Records Manager decides, based on its internal records security scheme, if the user can view the declared record. If not, the application removes it before presenting the result list to the user. IBM Records Manager effectively filters those corporate records users should not view from all search result lists.

Applying the Life Cycle

Every declared e-record and physical record is subject to a retention period (how long to keep it) and disposition (transfer to another agency or destroy). IBM Records Manager applies these retention/disposition rules to all declared e-records.

The IBM Records Manager Administrator runs a special Life Cycle utility. Internally, IBM Records Manager evaluates all records to determine which are qualified for disposition and prepares a list. Those documents marked for:

• Destruction are destroyed in a non-recoverable fashion
• Transfer are moved out of the object server repository to a temporary location on disk