Trending toward complaince

DeAnne Toto

Storage & Destruction Business magazine has dedicated articles in our Winter and Spring issues to the trends shaping information destruction and records and information storage and management. I also had the pleasure of moderating a session at the 2015 National Association for Information Destruction (NAID) Annual Conference where panelists Bob Korkos of Automated Shredding Inc., Taylor Oberst of Ohio Mobile Shredding and Lloyd Williams of Shredall offered their thoughts on what the information destruction industry would look like in 2020.

One trend both SDB features (“What Matters Most,” beginning on page 20 of the Winter issue, and “Teaching Opportunity,” beginning on page 20 of this issue), touch on is the issue of compliance, which also was a topic the NAID panel addressed.

Compliance is a critical concern for service providers and their clients, and it is the foundation of the services commercial records and information management (RIM) companies provide, whether they are shredding documents, storing hard-copy records or archiving data tapes in media vaults. But it also is a service in and of itself.

A number of commercial records management and information destruction companies offer guidance and support in this area to their clients. Iron Mountain, for instance, refers to these services as its Compliant Records Management Program, which the company says is designed to assist clients in improving compliance management “by gaining clarity on compliance regulations and their impact on organizations” as well as by helping them understand and better control their business critical records.

RIM businesses small and large are creating their own resources or leveraging those that already exist, such as the “Information Destruction Policy Compliance Toolkit” from NAID, to help their clients address compliance concerns. It’s an approach that helps service providers become more than “that company that shreds our documents” or “the place where we store our records”; it strengthens client relationships and makes it harder for clients to pursue the least expensive service provider because they realize their vendor’s value extends beyond the physical act of shredding or storage.

If this is an opportunity your business is not currently taking advantage of, maybe it’s time you reconsider your service offering.