Archiving is for posterity. Archiving is linked to long term conservation and history books, so not our concern. This is the general reaction of business people when launching a discussion on archiving. Does this mean that keeping information for the longer term has no value?

Although it has never been easier to store data, documents and information for eternity, the coming of the digital working environment has led to disappear good practices applied in the paper world. The historian will be very concerned with the potential gap in source material from the 2000s onward. The threat mainly comes from digital information formats. Native formats are generally ephemeral. Version upgrades of standard office documents came frequently, making initial word and powerpoint versions quasi unreadable. Digital perenniality is not strictly limited to file formats, it includes underlying storage characteristics and formatting, related to Operating System evolutions.

It seems this is mainly a concern for the archivist and historian, with which companies or organisations are confronted when they plan to write a corporate history at the occasion of a lustrum. Yes, this is a concern on the very long term of which you might dream but is certainly not one of your running concerns. You are convinced that it will not come to that. Although, a number of companies are known to have had a hard time to write a desirable lustrum book after the container having been placed under the office windows when cleaning up or moving to new offices. Due to the lack of physical aspect of digital information combined with technical issues mentioned, lack of substituting good practices, pure economical reflections and the focus on ongoing concerns lead to silent destruction and disappearing archives.

When discussing archiving with IT departments a number of concepts are synonymous for them, varying from providing back-ups for business data to providing for mass storage solutions in a life cycle management approach or when linked to e-mail archiving solutions. Main concern is reducing volume and thus managing the related budget.

When having to produce information in legal proceedings, one should be able to ascertain the authenticity and integrity of the information produced. The authentic document gives no reason to discuss its origin, its reliability or trustworthiness, where it is above any doubt that no unauthorised modifications have been made to the information. These are core elements in a records management setup together with the mechanisms to control and manage retention of information. The latter will permit control over the unwieldy growth of information created and accumulated by every organisation.

Even when stressing the quick evolution in markets and technology, an archive kept over time, contains a lot of knowledge. It can be referred to when referring similar cases, mining trends and evolutions.

The biggest added value of an archiving initiative is undoubtedly establishing, maintaining and managing retention periods, based on the minimal legal requirements, functional and business value of the information retained. Implemented as part of an electronic records management or archiving solution it relates to the filing plan. So, it is part of an overall information governance plan and requires extensive coordination with the legal department, IT and insight in the overall corporate strategy.

A number of standards can be used for reference in the archiving domain. They have their specific focus. OAIS main focus is preservation over time, while the records management standards DoD 5015.2, Moreq, ISO 15489 and Remano give a good base layer for providing authentic records in reply to legal compliance frameworks.

For many organisations it is not clear how to handle and integrate paper and digitally born documents. They either go for printing and storing the documents and filing them the traditional way or they attempt a full digitalisation effort. During time we lost the good practices established during 19th and early 20th century supporting the bureaucratic organisation. Trust in computer technology and the anticipated hope that technology will solve all issues has lead to creating a big digital landfill, full of unstructured document and information collections. Technology, such as search technology helps you find more in a larger pile in shorter times. However, the standard relevance ranking mechanisms in the search environment are surpassed, result list are to long, search brings up multiple copies of the same document, … Starting to organise then has become an even more daunting effort.

The concept of file plan is set in Records Management. Techniques of building the file plan are also useful in a global context of enterprise content management.

According to the United Nations Archives and Records Management Section it is “A plan or scheme developed by an office, department or organisation to organise and arrange different types of files”. The file plan is also known as file classification scheme; “a system that describes standard categories and that is used to organise records with common characteristics.” In the following we will see how to specify these fairly open definitions.

Practically, it is the backbone for organising records. The fact that it groups files and documents makes it a starting point for relating to the corporate established retention schedule.

These definitions might indicate that the usefulness of the file plan is confined to the records management domain. It is also useful for document management or structuring any content.

A file plan is basically a hierarchical tree structure reflecting the business of an organisation in a top down method, or built from general to specific. As such it provides a stable classification model for storing content. When retrieving content from an entry, the entry provides you with the creation context, thus elements for interpreting and understanding the content and its value. In most ECM systems this structure is created through the setup of folders. Although some people will argue that IT systems do not need folder structures I’m still a partisan of a firm file structure implemented as folders. On a lot of fora there is much discussion on the (exclusive) use of meta data for structuring and grouping content or applying folders as basic structuring element. The choice on how to implement your structure will depend on

As in all designs the good solution will be found in a balanced mix of approaches.

Although the United Nations Archives and Records Management Section hints at a creation of a file plan along the line of the organisation as the basis of arranging files, following options are available:

For constructing the file plan following general requirements can be cited:

Constructing a file plan along the lines of document series groups documents or records of the same type  chronologically (at least in the physical world). A series folder containing invoices or purchase orders may be broken down further by (accounting)year. From the transactional point of view this is an excellent option with easy matching of transaction entry and related document.

The case or “thing” approach is strongly related with the central unit of management or activity. The object is relatively broad and reflects in the file or dossier. The central object considered in a personnel department is an employee for which a personnel file is kept. In an insurance company claims files are related to customer files. With a growing stress on case based working and decision taking in non-routine processes this approach will be recognised more often.

Building the file plan along the organisation is often applied. For every devision, department, unit and team a file plan entry is made. It is extremely simple to setup, just copy the organisation chart and apply some further division. It is easy to adopt by the organisation. Everybody is member of an organisational unit and recognises the setup and structure. At the same time it is synonymous for the user groups governing permissions. However, as we all know the organisation chart fluctuates as it reflects the power distribution in the organisation and may follow management fads. Parallel to any restructuring, entries and often also individual documents needs to be moved between entries in the old and new file plan. This often takes quite some time and may pause the creation of documents. I have known organisations where a 6 months overhaul was common.

A strict organisational view will also result in the storage of multiple copies of documents as they are sent around for communication. The sending unit will store the document in the context of the execution of its tasks as author. The recipient stores as guideline for his activities.

Topic or subject as the basis for organising the file plan is mainly motivated by the needs of retrieval and reflects the content of a document. For setting up one can refer to general classification schemes as UDC (universal decimal classification) often used in academic libraries, Dewey classification (often used in the US and similar to UDC) or SISO (often used in smaller community libraries in Flanders and the Netherlands). They often provide not enough depth for company use. Specific branche oriented classification schemes can be found, certainly for the chemical and pharmaceutical domain. Main challenge when classifying documents is a lot of them cover different topics, think of meeting minutes and the development of the topic domain needing extension or even modifications. A topic or subject model reflect and models the state of art of a certain domain and changes accordingly.

Setting up the file plan along the lines of business function or main process (also called end-to-end process) results in a more abstract structure. It reflects the activities of the organisation. This approach is best and most stable when it is tied to the organisational core, its mission or reason of being and places the primary functions or processes at the core of the file plan model completed management and supporting functions.

In the ACA IT context it is fair to say that developing IT solution for customers in a project setting will be a core activity for quite some time to come. Central to the setup of the file plan is the project file, the central ‘thing’ we manage, as part of the function project management. In preparation of projects the acquisition process is structured along the lines of customers/prospects for which a file with commercial information is collected.

When you want to extend this approach to a collaborative document management environment you might want to stretch up the model and insert entries for more general reference materials and documentation.