Last Updated on April 18, 2024 Sarah Gayda
Top insights, trends and tips from the 2024 ARMA Houston Spring Conference, a fantastic event for records management and information governance info
ARMA Houston’s 2024 Spring Conference brought together records management, information governance, compliance and security professionals from Houston and the surrounding area to “educate, engage and explore.”
We found the event highly topical and focused on the challenges faced by information professionals today. Hearing from attendees at Colligo’s presentation, during other sessions and in the hallways, we picked up some key data governance insights and trends that we’d like to share with you.
Key conference insights and trends
- Email management is top of mind for many organizations. Email continues to be a challenge – particularly as the security needs of organizations increase and the regulatory and compliance challenges become more acute.
- The challenges of email management aren’t limited to just volume and silos. They extend to the deletion policies, where to store what, and how this will look when organizations begin using AI applications.
- Getting end-user buy-in and adoption of email management tools is difficult. We believe email management tools need to be simple and highly automated. Otherwise, most users will not use them. Secondly, we encourage proper end-user training and change management.
- Data continues to grow at a torrid pace, which means record creation is ballooning as well. A fun example we overheard was about the data being stored in filming the rehabilitation of wolves at a zoo in Texas. The records manager professional from this organization commented on the vast number of records created from the advances in technology and the increase in data being captured.
Why implement email retention policies & labels?
As the volume of data in almost every organization rapidly increases (emails, documents, etc.), managing and governing this information is critical. Why? It is important to:
- Proactively comply with regulations for your industry as well as internal policies
- Reduce the risks of litigation and security breach
- Share knowledge securely and effectively
By permanently deleting the old content and emails no longer needed or required to keep, organizations are limiting their risk in the event of litigation or a breach.
However, the key point is to ensure all records you need to keep are moved to SharePoint Online, and properly tagged and labelled to adhere to regulations or internal policies. This was highly interesting to ARMA Houston attendees this year, as more and more organizations look at email auto-deletion policies.
Email management observations and advice shared in our presentation
During our presentation on Email Management Excellence in Microsoft 365, we shared some observations and advice:
- Information governance complexity is increasing.
- A thoughtful approach to email management is advised.
- Email is a very important (if not crucial) component of your overall records management strategy.
- Like anything, email management needs to be easy and straight forward for end-users.
- Leverage tools like Colligo Email Manager for 365 and Colligo Office Connect for M365 in addition to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online to make this happen.
Hungry for a better way to manage emails in M365?
ARMA Houston 2024 conference attendees were hungry for a better way to manage emails in M365. Further, many organizations are still struggling and trying to figure out email management.
If you’re in the same boat, please get in touch, so we can help you out. Or if you’d like a copy of our Email Management Excellence in Microsoft 365 presentation or to see a quick demo of Colligo, reach out.
