Project Objectives
Profit and none-Profit needs to keep records of business decisions and transactions to meet the demands of corporate accountability. In profit and none-profit sector there are specific public accountability requirements as well as the need to comply with public records legislation. A record is evidence of an activity or transaction, and demonstrates accountability. Records are created by the day-to-day work that takes place in profit and none-profit; they need to be captured, managed and safeguarded in an organized system in order to retain their value.
Profit and none-Profits transforming the way work is carried out in government organizations, leading to a much greater dependency on electronic records. This transition to a fuller electronic environment presents both opportunities and challenges. While paper records will continue to exist and be generated for the foreseeable future, there is a general concern about the ability of government to manage and preserve those electronic records that are needed to support policy-making, casework and the delivery of services, and to meet accountability and archival obligations.
Electronic records management systems are needed to assist Profit and none-Profit organization in applying records management practices to electronic records. Electronic document management helps organization to exploit information more effectively and support the immediate operational requirement for business information. Electronic records management supports the medium to long term information needs of the business, building and maintaining the corporate memory. It manages a corporate filing structure to which records are classified, the integrity and reliability of records once they have been declared as such, and explicit disposal schedules which determine how long records should be kept and how they should eventually be disposed of – for some records by permanent preservation in the national archive.
An electronic records management system should be capable of managing electronic records throughout their lifecycle, from capture and declaration through ‘trusted record-keeping’ to eventual destruction or permanent preservation, while retaining integrity, authenticity and accessibility.
System Functionalities
1.1.1 Rationale
This section sets out the core requirements for an electronic records management system in some detail. There are three main areas of requirement:
Ø The ability to build and maintain a file plan structure, consisting of a hierarchy of folders that group together electronic records for management and access, and to which all records are classified.
Ø The ability to declare an electronic document as a corporate record, maintain its integrity as an authentic representation of a business action or decision.
Ø Ability to consistently manage the retention and disposition of folder of electronic record, retaining what should be kept and disposing of what should not.
1.1.2 Records organization and file plan structure
It will be necessary to place electronic records into cognate groups for access, management, and eventual disposal.
Electronic records will need to be ordered and organized to enable the complete and reliable retrieval of a complete group of records which relate to the same business activity, case or theme, so that the context of an individual record and the narrative of a sequence of records is preserved.
Electronic records need to be organized to facilitate management of a group of related records as a single unit, for purposes of scheduling, review, preservation and destruction, so that a management process is reliably applied to all records in the group at the same time.
These groups of electronic records are called folders; folders are the building blocks of a structured corporate file plan. Folders are usually arranged in a hierarchical structure which reflects and supports the business activities of a Profit and none-Profitorganization. Specific scheduling and management characteristics will be attached to every individual folder or group of folders, according to the record-keeping requirements of the business process which they represent.
1.1.3 Declaration and sustainability
It will be necessary to declare electronic records that are created or acquired to support business processes, and when this happens they must be managed and maintained as corporate records.
Electronic documents will be declared as corporate electronic records either at the time of creation or at a later date. Corporate policy and the record-keeping requirements of business processes will determine which records should be declared, and when. It is essential that the necessary record components, structure and metadata have been captured to ensure the record is a reliable and authentic representation of the business activity or transaction.
It will be necessary to sustain electronic records over time as a valued corporate asset, in a manner that retains their reliability and integrity for as long as they are required, preserving their value as a corporate record. This will include prevention of changes to the content or context to retain authenticity, and continued maintenance in an appropriate format to retain accessibility.
1.1.4 Retention and disposal
Every electronic record will be allocated to a folder at the time of declaration, and will be controlled by the disposal schedule allocated to that folder.
Disposal schedules define actions to be taken on all records within folders to which they are allocated, and consist of a retention period and disposition instructions. Disposition instructions may result in review, transfer to an archive for permanent preservation, or destruction, and will be initiated by fulfillment of the retention period conditions.
The record-keeping requirements of existing records may need to be reviewed from time to time, where these are affected by changes in the external environment or changes in understanding of the long term value of particular groups of records. In particular, at the folder level, decisions may need to be made relating to an adjustment in retention within the Profit and none-Profitorganization, to the sensitivity of the contents, or to selection for permanent preservation.
It will be necessary to export (transfer) some folders of records to the [initiative owner office / committee] or other appointed place of deposit for permanent preservation; and it may be necessary to export folders to another Electronic Record Management System.
Transfer will include both record content and descriptive material relating to record context, such as file structure, folder and record metadata.
It will be necessary to remove groups of folders or individual folders from the system following a decision to expunge them. This decision may be initiated by activation of a disposal schedule instruction which indicates destruction, or by confirmation of successful transfer to [initiative owner office / committee].
2. General Justification Details for Documentum System
Description
Documentum is Document Management software, which means that it provides a vault in which to store your documents. Rather than keeping their important files on a fileserver, companies put them in Document Management systems.
Documentum is like a normal file system (hard drive) on steroids. Instead of storing your files on your own hard disk, you store them inside the Documentum system. This allows people to access your files if they need to and allows you to access their files. It’s kind of like a network file server, but much fancier.
General Justification
Documentum from EMC Corporation is a unified content management system that provides tools for working with many types of content — documents, drawings, scanned images, hardcopy — in a single repository that can span multiple departments and functional areas within PROFIT AND NONE-PROFIT.
By managing all PROFIT AND NONE-PROFIT content in a single repository, it makes it easier to:
- Share and reuse information across PROFIT AND NONE-PROFIT
- Find information by means of full text searches, keyword queries, database-style SQL queries, and Windows Explorer-like navigation through disk directories
- Secure and control access to information
- Track changes, versions, and access logs
- Maintain audit trails and records for the purposes of regulatory compliance
- Automate or streamline business process and workflows
- Together, these benefits can mean increased efficiency, better decision-making, greater security, and reduced operating costs for PROFIT AND NONE-PROFIT.
Documentum can manage all manner of content:
- Electronic documents, such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, AutoCAD drawings, and Acrobat PDF files.
- Scanned images and OCR’d [optical character recognition] documents
- Binary data objects, such as executable files and compiled code
- Hard copy documents in the form of pointers to actual physical locations.
- Documentum also includes transformation services that make it easy to convert documents from one format to another. For example, you can easily convert an AutoCAD drawing to PDF format, or an Excel spreadsheet to HTML.
Workflow automation refers to taking a multistage business process — for example, a licensing activity that involves initiating a license request, exchanging subsequent correspondence, implementing required functions, creating required reports, passing inspections, and eventually obtaining final licensing approval — and capturing its various stages such that they can be programmatically automated, expedited, and/or verified. Such automation is often desirable for reasons of efficiency, consistency, quality, and completeness.
One of the most important sets of inputs the Documentum team gathered during the development phase was logical content categories for each PROFIT AND NONE-PROFIT functional area. These content categories were in turn mapped to database objects by the Documentum developer. The next step after the initial Documentum rollout will be to develop business processes and workflow automation around the particular needs of each functional area, using these database objects as programmatically controllable elements in various PROFIT AND NONE-PROFIT workflow scenarios.
From the standpoint of a Documentum user, if you want to take advantage of Documentum’s workflow automation capabilities, please be prepared to discuss your workflow needs with the Documentum team when the time arises. Your goal should be to define how you want to perform your job functions — that is, define how the tool works for you, rather than having the tool define how you work. Think about how you do your job, capture the various steps you perform, and then discuss with the Documentum team possible ways to automate or streamline these steps to make your job easier and more efficient.
From the standpoint of simply using your familiar software tools, and not thinking for the moment about any workflow automation you may eventually choose to use, there are two primary but relatively minor difference between what you are likely doing now and what you will do when using Documentum:
You will use the Documentum WebTop interface for most or all of your file management tasks, rather than Windows Explorer. You can continue to use Windows Explorer, if you wish for example, for managing personal files on your local hard disk, but content managed in this way will neither be under Documentum control nor leverage Documentum core services. Remember that the WebTop interface is similar in many ways to Windows Explorer, but has more powerful additional features and seamlessly integrates with the Documentum services and features.
Other than these two minor differences, you will continue using all your familiar Windows applications. You might have to get used to the idea of working on a network drive rather than your local hard drive, but for most users this difference will be transparent.
There are four choices when it comes to managing hardcopy documents and not limits to the following:
- Scan, OCR, and store them as electronic documents; suitable for primarily text documents, such as contracts, legacy records and logs, paper correspondence.
- Scan and store them as electronic images; suitable for drawings, tests with handwritten equations vendor catalogs, etc.
- Scan, perform zonal OCR and store them as electronic images with some text areas; suitable for multiple drawings, tests and reports that contain areas with consistent blocks text.
- Store the original hardcopy in a physical filing cabinet somewhere in the PROFIT AND NONE-PROFIT sites.
Summary
We are confident that the Documentum system will enable PROFIT AND NONE-PROFIT to achieve the outlined business/project strategy objectives, which include:
1- Manage effective efficient multilateral communication throughout the organization, internally and externally, using a single solution.
2- Enable existing systems and devices to utilize Documentum communication channel freely.
3- Ensure robustness of the solution with high uptime and backup procedures.
4- Enable audit tracking and escalations of failed communication.
5- Enable easy accessibility through its effective web based architecture.
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