Measuring GARP

The explosion in the quantity and types of electronic records has many organizations scrambling to get their hands around their information governance. The new GARP® (Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles®) Assessment is a powerful tool that can help an organization comprehensively assess its information governance practices.

Conforming with GARP assures the organization that its:

• Information will be protected against loss and critical records will be protected and easily accessib/le, allowing it to continue business in a disaster.
   
• Information will be available when needed. The organization will have systems and processes in place, allowing it to locate, retrieve and disseminate information to the right people for use in decision making, transacting business and responding to litigation.
   
• Information will be retained as required and disposed of when no longer required. The organization will have a records retention schedule that will ensure that information is being retained to meet its operational, legal, regulatory and historical requirements and that it is disposed of in the normal course of business when its required retention is met.
   
• External investigation and litigation obligations can be met. Processes will be in place to ensure information that is relevant to litigation or regulatory investigation can be located, placed on legal hold to ensure its availability and integrity and produced when needed.

The GARP Assessment evaluates more than 100 attributes of information governance an organization can deploy to determine how it compares with the GARP Principles. The assessment is organized by each GARP Principle to help determine the organization’s individual principle scores, leading to an overall GARP assessment score.

“The GARP Assessment will be a valuable weapon in any organization’s arsenal, allowing them to take the pulse of a single department, a division or the entire organization and providing results that will assist in moving an organizational information governance program forward,” Marilyn Bier, executive director of ARMA International, says.

Overland Park, Kan.-based ARMA International (www.arma.org) is a nonprofit professional association and the authority on information management and governance.