Records governance isn’t a nice to have, it’s critical to ensure the integrity and accuracy of your records. If your company is ever involved in legal action, your records will provide key evidence. Those records have to be authentic and reliable.

1. Records Governance,
Part 1:
Preserve the Value
of Your Information
Records governance isn’t a nice to have, it’s critical
to ensure the integrity and accuracy of your
records. If your company is ever involved in legal
action, your records will provide key evidence.
Those records have to be authentic and reliable.
“The international standard for records
management (ISO 15489) states that authoritative
records should have authenticity, reliability,
integrity, and useability [sic].” --The Probative
Value of Archive Documents, by Trudy Huscamp
Peterson
Organizations today face many challenges
to preserve their information asset. Different
business systems are used to create and manage
content and data without any governance of their
integrities or their retention periods. Any content/
data deemed important to maintain for compliance
reasons should be followed by a records
management system. For example, ENGIE, one of
the biggest company in the world in the business of
gas, power and energy services, uses the everteam
records management solution for driving their
governance policies
Moreover, this records management solution
provides capabilities to not only store records, but
guarantee they can be accessed by the appropriate
people and exported and readable at any point in
the future.
Whether you store records to comply with industry
regulations or based on your own company
policies, there are three things ensuring that you
can trust genuinely on your information capital.
www.everteam.com
745 Atlantic Avenue, Boston, MA 02111 – USA

2. How To Ensure Records
Integrity
Your organization creates and manages a great deal of information both
content and data. When this information is deemed to be important and
stored as records they are stored in a records management solution where
no one can modify them.
Integrity means that you follow your records to insure at any time in their
lifecycle that your records are exactly the same as when they were first
imported into the records management solution.
To ensure integrity, you must deploy dedicated features that confirm the
integrity of every file.
Business systems come and go. So how do you know content or data created in a
business system that is retired will be readable in the future?
Reversibility is the process to making sure your files and datas can be read and
accessible in the future. For example, the file format you choose to store your content
is important and depends on the type of file, but there are a couple of general rules
you should follow:
1. Text-based Content: According to ISO19005, PDFa is the common standard for
storing text-based files. PDFa is a specialized version of Adobe PDF that is used
for long-term storage of page-based documents. This standard maximizes device
independence, ensures the document is completely self-contained and self-
documented with the appropriate standards-based metadata.
2. Data: Data is typically stored in some type of database, either relational or NoSQL.
In a relational database, data is stored in tables, rows and columns. In a NoSQL
database, data is stored as documents typically in XML format. To ensure the
reversibility of the data stream, they should be exported to XML or CSV (comma
separated values) and stored in the records management application.
Also, when you place a file or data in an a records management application, the ability
to retrieve all that content at any point in the future is necessary. Many organization
find this difficult to do.
Your Records Management application requires an export function that can easily
retrieve the record in human readable format.
Reversibility:
Is the Record
Readable?
Records Governance, Part 1: Preserve the Value of Your Information 2

3. Records Governance, Part 1: Preserve the Value of Your Information 3
Audit:
What is the
Record
Lifecycle?
Storing a record isn’t enough to ensure its integrity and reliability. It’s also very important to
track all the actions on the document. By tracking how a document is accessed and used, you
can ensure that no one does anything do the record they don’t have permission to do.
A Records Management application must support the creation and maintenance of an audit
trail, typically stored and signed to insure his reliability. This audit trail is accessible from a
record directly.
You need to create an audit trail for the lifecycle of the record. Some things you must audit
include:
• Who did an action on the record ?
• When this action happened ?
• What was this action ?
A Final Note
The integrity of records is critical. Ensuring reversibility and
auditability are all important ways to ensure your records are
authentic and reliable and have demonstratable genuine value.
There are many other ways to take in account to preserve the Value
of Your Information, but these are the key ways.
Next time we’ll look at how you can provide one solution to manage
all archiving needs.

4. www.everteam.com
info@everteam.com
About
Everteam
Everteam brings over 25 years’ experience and innovation to the field of Enterprise Content
Management. In an ever-increasing legal and compliance environment, Everteam’s range
of products support the improvement of content –driven processes, and enable enterprise
customers to easily monitor and align their content strategies for overall organizational
efficiency and effectiveness.
+33 (0)1 72 71 33 3
336, rue Saint-Honoré,
75001 Paris – France
+1 (650) 596-1800 (voice) / +1 (650) 249-0439 (fax)
745 Atlantic Avenue
Boston, MA 02111, United States