After battling our shed this summer, we decided to take on a whole another realm of renovation and redo our basement. Again, there are a lot of considerations that need to go into redoing a basement so that it is ultimately comfortable and safe to use. Once or twice, I've had the interesting pleasure of walking into a house and seeing some very suspect additions or structures. My concern always is that not only do these types of addition affect the integrity of the house, but it also affects the usability in some cases if those additions aren't properly thought out. I'm happy to report that we did not have this problem, and we were thoughtful and intentional in our renovations, and we did manage to create a new cozy space for us and our dog.
Now you're probably wondering how my basement renovation relates to records management. Stick with me, dear reader, because there is a lesson to be learned here.
The secret to seamless records management lies within your information architecture. Similar to how a house needs to be intentionally, carefully, and thoughtfully designed (especially during renovations), the structure in which you store your content is stored should be an enabler not a setback for your data governance program.
Similar to how you end up with spaghetti permissions when changes are made on the fly, your information architecture in SharePoint online can also end up in a very messy state if you do not have governance, control, and intentionality behind your structure. But even beyond that, investing time and effort into your information architecture will pay dividends in your data governance program as it will allow you to achieve seamless records management for your end users.
Now, from an end user perspective, what does seamless really mean?
To us, seamless means that an end user does not need to actively select a classification when they upload a piece of content to SharePoint online. This is a big change management win because users do not want to have to think about selecting the correct classification. Often, organizations that require their users to select the classification find that users either select the first option all the time, or simply do not classify it all if it is not mandatory. This severely affects your ability to govern the content in SharePoint online.
With this issue in mind, seamless records management takes advantage of the information architecture to apply classifications by default, taking away the need for users to select the classification and instead only asking that day select the correct location to store their content when they create or upload.
So how do you take advantage of your information architecture to make sure your records management becomes seamless? They can be boiled down to three steps:
Take control of the architecture and prevent people from creating Teams sites, SharePoint sites, and document libraries without consulting the records management team. This gives governance control over the locations in which content will be stored. To be clear, adding new locations should not be discouraged, it just needs to involve the records management team for that thoughtful "renovation".
When changes are suggested, map each change back to a specific business need so that you have a good reason why the changes are made. This way you will have more clear justification of why locations exist, and you also have the opportunity to document each location and its intent for future training and reference.
With each suggestion, do the work of creating a one to one mapping between the new location and a records classification. If the location is not properly delineated, suggest changes to make sure that you get to that one to one relationship between the location and the records classification. By doing this work, you are achieving that seamless nature of records management by setting a default classification for each and every location that is created.
There are other ways to tackle the problem, including using metadata to choose a classification. But again, if you do metadata based classification, you will run into the issue of trusting users to enter data in order to govern the content. Your choice of the degree to which you use the most records management depends on your trust in your users, and your trust that they will follow through on the expectation of filling out metadata.
That being said, if you do not trust them to fill out metadata in an effective and timely manner, going fully seamless will benefit your records management program overall.
Now from the user perspective, a new information architecture does come with the need for change management. This will change how they use SharePoint, but again with an intelligently constructed information architecture, the experience should still be very positive for each and every end user.
If you're curious about how to build an architecture for truly seamless records management, feel free to get in touch with our advisors who can help you wrap your head around structuring your SharePoint online environment in the most efficient and effective way
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