Recently, I have been exploring the impacts of poor records and information management and how the user experience of your information management systems is an important component in driving effective information management in your organisation.

Due to the often-overwhelming amount of data organisations are generating, the risk of losing track of valuable and confidential information exposes a multitude of legal and regulatory risks.  As a result, enterprise records and information management is emerging as one of the most important and critical business problems of our time.

Some impacts of poor records and information management include:

• Inefficiencies – time spent capturing and looking for information, recreating information;
• Low Trust – questions about the completeness and accuracy of information used to make decisions;
• Regulatory Risks – missing information, holding onto information too long or not long enough.

Now, more than ever, organisations need to invest in enterprise-wide records and information management solutions and technologies to reduce risk, optimise costs and comply with regulations.

The significant task at hand is to create a consistent, understandable and defensible enterprise-wide records and information management program for managing the entire lifecycle of information – from conception to destruction.  Of course, deploying the right technology is important but it’s also equally important to engage employees and inspire them to adopt records and information management policies, processes and technologies in a continuously changing world.

Underestimating the ‘people’ aspects of an enterprise-wide records and information management program means organisations often fail to reap the benefits they seek from their technology and process investments.  Employees need to understand why an enterprise records management program should matter to them, but they also need to be provided with user-friendly tools that make the capture of required information easy and don’t burden them with additional processes or steps.

User Experience

‘User Experience (UX)’ is one of the most important characteristics of an effective records and information management system. Why you ask? User experience is closely linked to technology adoption because it tries to fulfil the user’s needs and aims to provide positive experiences that enable users to complete the required tasks with ease. Additionally, a meaningful user experience allows you to define the user journey that is most conducive to business success.

Useability

‘Usability’ is also essential to the user’s acceptance of a records and information management system. The simplicity and quality of a system make it useful in achieving a user’s goals. A system should be easy to use, quick to learn, like-able, and subjectively pleasing to the user.

Several sociodemographic factors can affect both the user experience and the technology adoption.  These include, not surprisingly, ‘age’ and ‘gender’. From an age perspective, it has been found that ‘younger’ worker’s usage decisions are strongly influenced by their attitude toward technology while ‘older’ workers are more strongly influenced by subjective norms & perceived behavioural control.  From a gender perspective, men are more strongly influenced by their perceptions of usefulness, while women are more strongly influenced by perceptions of ease of use and subjective norms.

Useful tools to help transform your information management

When it comes to transforming the way your organisation approaches its records and information management, one of the major challenges is how to manage emails. inMailX is a useful tool that provides user-friendly email management, compliance and productivity capabilities that empower users to easily manage their emails. With inMailX you can manage your emails from the Outlook interface while integrating with your chosen information management system such as TRIM/Content Manager, RecordPoint and SharePoint. At the heart of it, the whole user experience and workflows become easier and seamless, so tasks, which generally take numerous steps, can easily be processed and completed in a minimal number of clicks.

To learn more about how email productivity and InMailX can be an important part of your digital transformation, talk to one of our information management experts.