Driving Records & Information Management Transformation: Enabling program adoption

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1 October 2014 Driving Records & Information Management Transformation: Enabling program adoption At a glance As companies work to create structured control over information, they often find that people challenges trump technology and process changes as obstacles to success. Successful companies anticipate, plan for and address employee reactions proactively to secure the value and benefits they seek.

2 Other Driving Records & Information Management Transformation Enabling program adoption Organizations are generating staggering amounts of data. As information piles up, they risk losing track of their valuable and confidential information, exposing themselves to a myriad of legal and regulatory risks. Enterprise records management is emerging as one of the most important and critical business issues of our time. Now more than ever, companies must invest in enterprise-wide records management practices and technologies to reduce risk, optimize costs, protect shareholder value and comply with regulations. The monumental task at hand is to create a consistent, understandable and defensible enterprise-wide records management program for managing the entire life cycle of information from creation to destruction. Of course, deploying the right technology is important. But, it s equally vital to change employee attitudes and behaviour. Employees must be inspired to adopt policies, processes and technologies in a continuously changing world. Companies that underestimate the people aspects of rolling out enterprise-wide records management programs often fail to reap the benefits they seek from their technology and process investments. One-time trainings are rarely enough to bake new practices into daily routines. Employees must understand and embrace why the enterprise records management program should matter to them. The risks of failure are significant: Time-sensitive responses to legal, regulatory, or other records retrieval requests are significantly delayed or incomplete, resulting in penalties, sanctions, and/or fines, Unintended disclosure of sensitive information can result in significant reputational, security and legal risks, and Storage costs can continue to grow unabated given the organization s inability to execute its records retention schedule. What does it take to cultivate a culture where records and information management is taken seriously and practiced routinely? At leading practice companies, prudent information management is a way of working. They design and deploy comprehensive change management programs to help employees understand how and why new records management requirements apply to their current work activities. Though the scope and specifics will vary across companies, leading practice companies know successful records management typically relies on sustained changes in employee attitudes and behaviour.

3 Driving successful change and transformation Successful enterprise-wide records management programs include careful planning to drive meaningful change in employee awareness, attitudes and behaviour. Their leaders have the skills to anticipate a range of obstacles related to people, process, and technology. Most tend to focus on four broad areas: executive engagement, business-level engagement, business process alignment and effective communication. The illustration below provides a high-level overview of the associated objectives and key activities of these four broad areas that support change and transformation. Create the Face of Change Executive Engagement The old adage that leadership counts is no different in enterprise-wide records management than in any other enterprise-wide initiative. Organizations whose leaders make the effort to endorse and model new behaviours typically find higher levels of adoption across their organizations. And those that define leadership broadly to include division- and unit-level supervisors for example see the most results by closing the gap between what employees hear from C-suite executives and their own managers. Successful enterprise-wide records management programs also need a governance structure. More than issues identification and risk management, governance helps to ensure: Effective and regular communication Accountability Resource availability Insight and perspective on business needs and processes Alignment with other related, relevant enterprise initiatives Increasingly, the governance structure of enterprise records programs involves compliance, IT, legal as well as business stakeholders. A cross-functional governance team can more effectively establish standards, procedures, and policies that reflect user needs and constraints than one limited to representation by legal and IT. Cross-functional representation will also empower the executive sponsor with the credibility necessary to serve as the face of change and set the tone for leadership involvement and ownership. Leaders both as individuals and in the form of governance must themselves demonstrate the practices they seek to embed across the organization, making them part of their day-to-day business activity. When leaders model behaviours that correspond with new policies referencing documents that require retrieval from the records management platform or collaborating with teams to develop content through the use of the tool, for example employees will be more willing to follow suit.

4 Power from the Middle Business-level Engagement Records management is a business priority that requires the attention of the entire enterprise. It won t happen in isolated, reactive ways. In addition to involvement by leaders and key stakeholders such as IT and legal, the enterprise will need champions from within employee ranks to serve as ambassadors to drive behaviour change. Some of the ideal individuals already hold a role similar to that of a records coordinator or department records administrator i.e., employees who understand and help the company comply with existing records management business processes and requirements. Supported by new governance and working closely with functional leaders, these champions can instil change, serve as critical liaisons between leadership and the business area and monitor and manage compliance. Equally important, they are resources for making training and communication relevant to business users, two critical change factors. Similarly, they can aggregate user needs and form questions in language that will resonate with leadership, support groups and other stakeholders. The expectations are significant, as can be the rewards. When employees understand how their actions will contribute to successful goals realization, they are more willing to change, adopt and maintain new attitudes and behaviours. Processes that Enable Records Management and Business Process Alignment Linking new technologies to the business processes they support is a critical element in records management implementations. Too often, organizations focus their programs simply on the installation and deployment of technology solutions, overlooking the need to design and configure these solutions to mirror the processes and procedures they will support. A technology alignment gap often results, creating near certain failure in user adoption. When organizations take time to engage the business collaboratively, from the start, to define and configure records and information management technologies with the business process in mind, the results are almost always instructive and positive. One way to ensure the technology aligns with business processes is through the use of structured, interactive workshops with user communities to build records management file plans and organization schemes. These workshops can serve many purposes, including: Establishing a broad understanding of the functions, processes, and tasks that lead to record creation Allowing user communities insight to drive the records management system design Engendering a sense of pride and ownership among all participants over the resulting product Ultimately, a well aligned system provides tangible connections to familiar business processes that ease user adoption and enterprise-wide embrace of the new environment. Words with Impact Effective Communication One reason employees resist change is that they can t make sense of what s expected. Being told they will need to change how records are managed could very well draw a complete and understandable blank. What s a record anyway? And what does it mean to manage one? Two things can certainly help here: choice of words and relevance.

5 Companies that use simple language to drive understanding about what needs to happen and change enjoy improved employee responses. Making the information relevant to defined groups also helps. Describe not only what the program is and what it s for, but tailor that description for its many audiences (leadership and staff) and functional areas (IT, HR, sales, operations). Records coordinators or champions will play a role here, but the program needs to make time for the effort this will take, helping to establish that hot buttons" are addressed and that specifics on what to "stop," "start," and "continue" are specified. A change plan enables successful records management The change plan is like a roadmap. Without it, employees will lose focus and direction. The change plan is a timeline for the activities, milestones and outcomes that will support records management program execution. Shaped by input from across the organization, it specifies activities, tactics, timing, responsibilities and project ownership, anticipating activities that are both proactive (e.g., announcements) and reactive (e.g., Q&As in response to stakeholder queries) in nature. What Employee Adoption Looks Like They embrace new policies, standards and guidelines as a new way of working They champion links between business risk and compliance They recognize areas in the workplace that are not adhering to best practices They support initiatives to raise awareness of records management and its benefits A change plan must be structured and dynamic at the same time. It must be flexible to accommodate the kinds of changes that can arise when, for example, insight concerning a particular employee group suggests the need for different tactics and actions. These insights will occur regularly and will require close coordination by project managers to facilitate effective responses in planning, without losing sight of the end game. The plan should seek to establish creative opportunities where behaviour can be modelled and reinforced by leadership, recognition is provided to early adopters, mechanisms exist to capture feedback and measures are in place to track awareness and use. Support for leaders and records coordinators should also be anticipated in the form of toolkits, templates and agendas. The change plan is perhaps one of the most effective ways to help implement a truly transformational records management program. It is both beneficial and critical at all stages of any records management program. To have a conversation about how to develop and deploy an enterprise records management program, please contact one of the following PwC thought leaders: Jane Allen Carlock (415) jane.allen@us.pwc.com John Karren (703) john.t.karren@us.pwc.com Brian Wycliff (917) brian.wycliff@us.pwc.com Joshua Rattan Director (301) joshua.r.rattan@us.pwc.com A special acknowledgment to the authors of this piece: Benjamin Ferko, Heather Peck, and Bethany Sehon 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, a Delaware limited liability partnership. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the US member firm, and may sometimes refer to the PwC network. Each member firm is a separate legal entity. Please see for further details. This content is for general information purposes only, and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.