Records Management Best Practices for Financial Services and Insurance by Jeff Picozzi

Earlier this year, in conjunction with Cohasset Associates, Iron Mountain released the 2013-2014 Information Governance Benchmarking Survey for Financial Services and Insurance. With these new survey results, the time is ripe to examine records management best practices in the insurance industry to determine the challenges that remain.

Paper Versus Electronic Maturity

While virtually all insurance companies have a records and information management (RIM) program, many are still working to build the required collaboration among legal, compliance and information technology (IT) that is required to develop an enterprise-wide information governance (IG) framework. Only 24 percent of insurance industry survey participants reported having a mature RIM strategy.

Unsurprisingly, RIM is considered more mature for paper records than electronic records. For example, 62 percent of respondents reported the automatic destruction of paper records stored offsite, while only 53 percent automatically delete electronic messages, 8 percent automatically delete from enterprise content management systems and 12 percent partially automate content deletion from clouds.

As electronic records continue to grow in the insurance industry, records management professionals must step up their game. They must collaborate with their IG peers to ensure sufficient processes and technologies are available for every type of electronic record that must be retained. Moreover, the same processes and technologies that can be used to ensure the preservation of required records should also be used to get rid of redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT) content. Getting rid of ROT content may well provide the positive return on investment that is needed to acquire the necessary electronic records management software to automate the process.

Legal Holds

While 80 percent of respondents reported that their firms have a legal hold process, 77 percent said legal holds resulted in the over-preservation of information. This is a wonderful opportunity for IT, records management and legal professionals to help each other. Although some lawyers create overly broad legal holds in a surfeit of caution, many lawyers simply do not have a clear understanding of where relevant paper and electronic information are likely to be found, so they order overly broad holds. Records managers and IT personnel should create an enterprise data map of which information is stored and where. While legal holds are built around subject matter areas, legal holds tend to be broader; while key custodians and date ranges associated with a matter can be discerned, it is much easier to construct a narrower legal hold.

Records management best practices have come a long way, but as the discipline of records management morphs into IG and as electronic information continues to displace paper as the primary record media, the insurance industry will have new challenges in managing its record-keeping operations.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2014/industry/insurance/records-manageme...
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