KeyCorp manages the risk through a set of policies that makes every department responsible for destroying its unneeded files and e-mails. "There is a logical process and a reason that a document exists or doesn’t exist," says Rickert. Still, he knows there’s room for improvement. The current process depends on LAN administrators to deleteing files manually and each department keeping on top of its records deletion responsibilities. There’s no formal process for making sure departments comply with their own standards.

It’s not that companies such as KeyCorp don’t manage data well from an IT perspective. The problem is that their files often aren’t being managed according to their content. Copies of important documents may be kept on PCs or servers long after the official copy has been destroyed. Moreover, important digital files may have little long-term access or version control applied to them, casting doubt on their authenticity and undermining their future credibility as evidence. "The biggest mistake is that IT people often think archiving tape backups and discarding of them at a certain date is records management," says Julie Gable, principal Gable Consulting, an electronic records advice company in Wyndmoor, Pa.

Without retention schedules imposed on them, IS departments often omit the disposal piece of the puzzle, says Jessen. "IT people tend to want to hold on to information for as long as possible," he says. One of his clients underwent a legal risk assessment and discovered 50,000 backup tapes of corporate information that had supposedly been destroyed. IT managers had stored the tapes offsite, just in case they were needed. "Had those tapes been subpoenaed, the company was looking at a potential bill of $50 million to sort through them all for relevant information," Jessen says.

Build Records Management with KM

But records management isn’t all about lawsuits. It can also help CIOs improve their companies’ knowledge management systems by providing a rich framework of information about each document?called meta-data?that can be used for organizing and accessing a KM system. "It’s easy to get off on a legal-exposure tangent, but CIOs who aren’t dealing with this are also missing a huge opportunity to organize and mine the legacy records of the company," says Richard Barry, principal of Barry Associates, an Arlington, Va., electronic records consultancy.

Electronic records management is a key foundation for the KM system at Washington, D.C.-based World Bank, which finances economic development projects in developing countries. "Many of the documents we create with client countries need to be kept for more than 30 years, and we have over 900,000 documents," says Mohamed Muhsin, CIO of The World Bank. Shipping documents to employees around the world was slow and expensive. "A 100 percent electronic storage and access system will make retrieval faster and cheaper," he says.