GRC Journal - (Page 15) Governance, Risk & Compliance – procedures that the law department uses to ensure, at the first smell of trouble, that the company can preserve anything potentially relevant. Lack of such a policy can lead to disaster – the type of destruction of evidence that has ended careers, driven down stock values, and destroyed whole companies. Another thing that companies may want to consider is developing a litigation response plan. This type of plan brings together the law, IT, and records management departments to ensure that processes are in place to preserve relevant information and throw out unimportant information well before trouble strikes. How can taking a proactive approach to information management alleviate legal problems that may be lurking further down the road? Businesses need to proactively apply records retention rules to a whole host of electronic records. Compliance is not a business decision – it doesn’t matter if the law is hard to comply with or its demands are expensive or inconvenient. Courts and regulators don’t appreciate, and certainly do not countenance, businesses making decisions about whether or not they will comply. Even though it’s challenging, laws require businesses to retain certain important records. Also, regardless of the regulations and laws, businesses need to get a handle on their e-information for business purposes. For example, businesses generate billions of email messages every day, more and more of which contain essential information with business and legal implication requiring their retention as a company record. Some messages are clearly junk and resources should not be wasted on their long-term management without business or legal justification. Institutions need to save what is necessary and throw out what isn’t, and most importantly, understand the difference. Getting rid of the junk by applying records management principles to electronic information culls the volume making access to needed information more expeditious, which helps employees answer a customer’s question or respond to a regulator. A proactive approach puts procedures in place – at the employee level – that manage this information. Then a business doesn’t have to sweat the new regulations, and if more regulations/laws/rules are on the horizon, the business can simply tweak its existing policies rather than scramble to create new ones. Being proactive also saves some worries over pending investigations, litigation, and audits. Being proactive allows businesses to concentrate on their work rather than worrying about or weeding through all that electronic stuff. Technology was supposed to help companies with their communications, records, and information. But sometimes BTQ Business Trends Quarterly 49 Q1 2007 | www.btquarterly.com http://www.btquarterly.com
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