Imagine all your enterprise records accessible in one place, governed by one set of policies. Consider a single system for classifying and saving records throughout your entire enterprise. How much more efficient would that make the business? Unified records management (URM), as the name suggests, can help make such wishful thinking a reality.

Although a weakening economy has only intensified pressures to be more efficient, businesses continue to generate huge amounts of data. Meanwhile, regulations certainly aren’t going away. In fact, the recent credit crisis may only make them stricter. As a result, you need to manage your records more efficiently than ever.

According to Doug Miles, director of market intelligence at AIIM, the industry association for content management, events triggered by the recession are made more complicated without a URM policy in place. “Our research shows without unified records management, 80 percent of organizations would take more than a week to produce all its data for a single customer. In the current economy, with customer bases being merged through forced acquisitions and restructurings, you can imagine how valuable a unified records management strategy can be.”

URM offers an approach that lets you manage and retain records in one place, regardless of how or where data are stored. Unlike federated records management, a more common but less efficient approach, URM uses one set of rules for classification, retention, security, and access.

To understand the practical benefits of URM, here’s how it helps with four common records management challenges.

Without an efficient records management system, staff often waste time searching for records that are poorly classified, hidden or simply lost. Often workers duplicate efforts by recreating records that can’t be found. Since URM stores a record in one place for its entire existence, staff don't waste time searching or effort recreating a redundant record.

A URM system can also integrate directly with business applications, such as finance, human resources, customer records management and enterprise resource planning. As a result, workers access records not only quickly, but also in a relevant business context.

Records management compliance regulations vary by industry and region. However, all generally require a demonstrable records management system that can validate the authenticity, integrity and usability of your records.

URM offers an automated and consistent process for retaining and aggregating records in a logical structure. You can customize the process to your specific needs, using business processes as a basis for the retention, disposal and security rules you apply. Audit trails are automatically applied so that you can validate the history of any record at a moment’s notice.

Legal records request, whether for e-discovery, external audit or accreditation, are often both time-sensitive and sweeping. In many cases, you must quickly produce and validate a large number of records. If records aren’t accurately classified and easily accessible, your staff, or worse, external legal staff, will spend countless hours manually searching. This can be an extremely costly and risky endeavor.

URM captures and classifies records on creation and stores them with their relevant business context. As a result, you can quickly produce the right records in case of an e-discovery or other legal request. By clarifying which records you can destroy, URM can also mitigate your legal exposure by helping eliminate records that would otherwise be subject to legal scrutiny. Plus, fewer records reduce the strain on storage systems.

Even if you’ve established clear guidelines for records management, making sure they’re adhered to can be the biggest challenge. While it’s ambitious to expect busy employees to remember record management policies, failure to enforce these guidelines can undermine even the best-laid plans.

Enforcing company-wide records management standards is where a URM solution truly shines. Federated records management attempts to manage records in disparate silos with inconsistent policies. In contrast, unified records management allows you to view and manage all of your records, with a consistent set of policies.

While records management systems are built mainly to satisfy laws, the ability to make better business decisions is an equally important benefit of getting your records in order. Figuring out where to begin is often the hardest part.

HP, in partnership with AIIM, has developed a simple online records management competency assessment tool . In addition to evaluating your organization's competency in records management, the assessment identifies risks in your current approach and highlights the benefits of progressing to the next level of records management.

HP offers a comprehensive URM solution to help organizations get more value from their information and comply with a growing list laws and regulations. To learn about how unified records management works, download “Unified records management: A new solution to an age old problem”, a white paper from HP.

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