Name: Flying Solo, Moving Forward: Practical Lessons for Lean Records Teams
Uploaded: 2026-09-17T19:16:10.621Z
Duration: 59 min 45 s
Description: Flying Solo, Moving Forward: Practical Lessons for Lean Records Teams

Transcript for "Flying Solo, Moving Forward: Practical Lessons for Lean Records Teams": Hello, everybody. Welcome to this webinar. We have Jennifer from Armo with us here today. And, Jennifer, I know you wanted to share some announcements before we get started with the discussion. So. I'm gonna, pass. it over to you. Yeah. I'll I'll go ahead and kick us off. So welcome to today's webinar. We're excited to have everyone. You are here today for flying solo moving forward, practical lessons for lean records teams. I know there's a lot of those out there. Definitely more lean teams than robust teams, I think, in the world. Okay. Well, I'll go ahead and get it started. For those of you who don't know me, I am Jennifer Millett, and I kinda lead the events and education and, you know, kind of all the resources side of the world for ARMA International. And if you are a member, we are so grateful that you're here in joining us and taking advantage of your membership with us today. If you're not a member, we, you know, always encourage you to go check out arma.org and see all the things that we have to offer. You know, I always like to say we just like to try to make this world a little smaller for you, you know, try to connect you with a colleague, you know, somebody who can who's, you know, faced a challenge that you're facing or is facing the current challenge you're facing, you know, somebody who can kinda help walk the same walk that you're walking. So we try to do that for you at Arma or offer some education, you know, have an event, connect you to a business partner who can give you a solution that will make your world a little easier. So that's what we try to do for you at Arma. If you are not familiar, please, you know, go to arma.org and see how that we have to offer. So that's who we are and jump on from there. And then like I mentioned, very near and dear to my heart is Infocon. It is coming up in just a little over, a month. Actually, thirty seven days to be exact. Infocom will be happening. And Melanie and the wonderful people at Access will be joining us, in something new that we have just launched that I really would love. Even if you're not attending ARMA, this is something kind of fun you can do. We have, created a little assessment that you can do. So if you wanna, pop on to, our website or I will also sneak the, URL in here, you can do a little assessment and kinda see where you are according to the, IGIM, and it will give you, a suggested conference agenda based on your, strengths and opportunities according to the IGIM. So it's something really cool that we have wanted to do for a really long time, and it's new this year. So you can kinda build your own customized agenda according to your, strengths and opportunities. So something really cool, and we hope everyone will kinda go, and see kinda where you land within our agenda. And we'll also kinda give you an idea, like, you know, you everyone goes and looks at an agenda and is like, oh, I wanna take these sessions, but which one should I take? Well, this one will really kinda give you this will give you an idea of what you should take, you know, based on, kind of your skill set and your needs. So it's super really exciting. But we hope you you take advantage and and join us in Savannah. We have lots of really good things. I know Melody's team's got some good things planned, so I don't know if you wanna kinda. tease, Definitely. you know, what you're doing there. Yeah. This sounds super exciting. One thing that access has going on while we're gonna be in Savannah is on the morning of the twenty seventh, that's Monday, we're hosting a round table and breakfast that's actually on a topic really similar to what we're talking about today. So I put a link to that in the chat if you guys wanna check it out or potentially even register if you'll be there. And then also in the docs tab, which was right next to the chat, there is a link to Arma Infocon twenty twenty six, so you can check that out there as well if you still need to register for InfoCon. Awesome. Yes. We well, you know, we're looking for it, and we'd love to see everyone there. The more, the merrier. Yes. Never know. You might find your best information governance friend at InfoCon. And then we are running a back to school sale. You know, back to school is not just for students. We do have some really great coursework and resources all available for 30% off. You just have to enter the code, school 26. It's not just for members. So if you're not a member and you wanna, you know, upskill in some of your IG or records, learning, you can enter that code and access some of our top education programs or get ready to become an IGP. All of our study materials are available at 30% off, which is a great, discount on those programs. The exam itself is not available for discount. That just because it's governed by that body that does that credentialing program, but the study materials to become an IGP is available for discount. So take advantage while that sale is available. And moving on from there, just as always, we wanna give a big shout out to our very good friends at Access who supports, Arma in the very best ways. We hope that when you are considering products and resources for your organization, you consider those organizations that support you, and Access does it in the very best ways. So thank you Access for sponsoring Arma, and just being there for us along for the ride. And with that, I think we are gonna move over to today's speakers. So I will give Melanie the honor of introducing our speakers today. you. Yes. Thank you. Rebecca, Mike, thank you so much for joining us. Would you please give us a little quick introduction of yourselves and maybe a little bit of background on what your teams look like at your companies? Rebecca, I'll hand it to you first. Okay. Hi, everybody. Good afternoon, and welcome, and thanks for supporting us. I will speak for Mike and I on that one, but I am from American Electric Power. I have been in my role now for about just over twenty years now. We started off locally in our generation department and expanded enterprise back in 2019. I am a team of six technically from our whole information protection, privacy, and security awareness team. However, there are two dedicated resources. So I have one in addition to myself that focuses solely on information governance and content management best practices, which include the retention schedule, physical records, and we do the system of record for the company and our product owner for it along with DocuSign retention schedule and all those other pieces and parts within the program that if there's information tied to it, our team is involved somehow, somewhere from protection privacy to content management. So small team to do big things, definitely. And you learn to adjust. I would I'll start it off with that and turn it over to Mike. Thanks, Rebecca. Yeah. I call our team, but small but mighty. Hi. My name is Mike Allen. Record of records and information governance, at KP and G US. We are the largest member firm of the, KP and G international network. And, yes, we are a mighty team of seven, serving over 40,000, professionals across the across The US. our team members' location isn't really as important as it used to be because, we completed our digital transformation, before I arrived. Thank goodness. And, so we don't really manage active, reading semi active paper records anymore. We're more in the business of reducing our holdings. As I'll get to in a little bit, we do sit in enterprise enterprise data governance, area, which is, I think not a traditional place for, records. It's usually in, compliance or legal somewhere. But I think more and more, we're now seeing, you know, records become part of, you know, information security. You know, there might be specialized governance function, etcetera. But what our team does is we, like like Rebecca, we manage enterprise retention schedule. we manage all the retention and disposition of all firm records, paper and electronic. We also manage, several, applications. We're we're the business owner for several applications, including our document records management system, our enterprise archiving, tool, and a few other things. And, of course, compliance monitoring. We do a lot of consultations, with our departments. We're we're here to support them. We don't really manage their records at this point. More as we provide guidance and we help ensure, compliance. We are a very highly regulated firm, as you can imagine. So, people at KPMG, which is generally a risk diverse firm, they get the compliance thing. And that kind of, although we don't sit in the traditional compliance function, I, you know, I still view our role as a compliance first. I always equate it to kind of like an offensive line in football. You know, the records team really, people don't pay attention to the records team too much unless, you know, unless your quarterback gets sacked or something bad happens, and then all of a sudden, people are running to records. We try to avoid that. Instead, we, we're a very proactive, departments and ensure that, you know, compliance is the very baseline. Depends if we're not compliant, nothing else really matters. I'll turn it back over to you, Melanie. Yeah. Thank you both. So, Rebecca, you kinda touched on this briefly, but what exactly sits in your space and what relies on partners elsewhere in the business? Whenever you're working through just a typical week of all of the stuff to balance? Yeah. So, honestly, a lot of it sits with me. Unfortunately, I would love to have a lot more buy in from the business and then managing their information better than what we are, but we're we're still tracking up. And that's the we're we're in a positive light still and we're making progress, but, honestly, I mean, the the shredding side of the house, I have that pretty much handed off to region coordinators, and they run with the shredding aspect of making sure the bins and that are picked up, and the locations have what they need from that perspective along with being that first point of contact for anything that needs to be stored or sent off-site. They can go to those folks that that network is pretty stable and in place around the operating territories, and we have six, seven regions now. So from that side, that helps me on that realm. Really, we divvy up the work and truly are working from a backlog of just what's priority and vice versa and not that one week I mean, today, priority item happened this morning. I had a phone call and went up and went through an office this morning that was not on my radar at all, but the new person starting Monday and the previous owner was left behind, lost the boxes, so they need secured, shipped off-site, and things happen. So it's just really playing that what what becomes the priority today and you hope that nothing happens all at once from competing items because if it all happens at once, we're in trouble. In all honesty, we Yep. we'd be heard. sure a lot of people in the audience can relate to that too. And, Mike, you mentioned that the enterprise data governance. So what work actually is sitting with you, and how are you connected with other departments in the business like legal technology, etcetera. Yeah. Yeah. We, we do sit in the, enterprise data governance group, which is part of our, data function, which is part of our digital function, which is, you know, now, you know it's really IT, but we call it digital. So I've had to learn a lot of, IT jargon, which is not which is not my favorite thing, but but definitely, a big part of the job now, especially with the applications we support. So although we don't sit, you know, in a compliance type of function, again, our as I mentioned before, compliance is our first, you know, is our first job. And and so we work very closely. I have built alliances, with our general counsel's office. They're they're probably our besties, across. the firm along with, our risk, our risk management's, teams. And, so we really have a very good, connection with them. And it works well because, we we kind of speak the same language, as the, you know, as the attorneys and the risk management practitioners. We're both we're both after the same same thing. Our our general counsel's office has really gotten pretty progressive. They, and and for those of you who work in legal or have been part of legal apartments, know that, attorneys can be, packrafts sometimes, and I say this lovingly because I'm married to one. But the, they've really come a long ways in that they they realize the the dangers of over retention. They get it. They know the risk involved. And so they, they are an active partner in helping us, mitigate risk to the firm and which is great because, you know, information we're in an information economy, information can present risk. So we wanna we wanna minimize that risk. And I said before, we're largely, you know well, first, we're compliance, you know, focused. But beyond that, we do sit in enterprise data governance, and we need to demonstrate how we, add value to the firm and and help the firm achieve its objectives. And, you know, our objectives are, you know, maybe different from Rebecca's, you know, in that, you know, she's working, you know, with the power utility. We're, you know, we're kind of an accounting and and consulting services firm. But the, you know, the ultimately, you still need to, comply with the regs. You still need to, hit your budget. You still need to hit financial targets. And, now that we're really, information enablers, you know, managing applications, we need to ensure that our our, billable professionals, are working the applications that are always up. So, you know, customer service is is big in our organization, because if they're not, if our professionals aren't making money, we're not making money, and we don't have jobs. And we're largely, you know, an AI first now, AI first firm now, I should say. So we really work, to ensure that, we are, you know, making sure that our data ecosystem is as clean as possible, that's, our all of our AI engines and corpuses and all that stuff, that that they're getting fed clean data, relevant data, current data, and not outdated data. And that's that's a huge tour. We're not it's not mission accomplished by any, by any stretch of the imagination. So, yeah, we're connected with, you know, IT and digital. I work with we work with our IT, support teams multiple times a day. I can't believe how. plugged in we are, but that's good. And, so that's really kind of although we do sit in an IT function, we still build alliances where we're not, you know, sitting, because it's just as important. Yep. That's very important, I agree. especially with small teams. Yes. Yeah. I know it we're the same way, Mike, with IT and that that we because we own the system and have that responsibility. I know way more about the back end side of systems than I should ever know, to put it fairly, and what out with people. But at the end of the day, it also helps me know what the business needs to take that forward as well because I have had my hands in it for so long and know the system like the back of my hands. So it's it's it's nice from having that side too because, again, we can tell the team what we need and drive that work too back from them. And if they can't tell us that we can't do something because I know back and forth that things can be done, it's just it's a matter of time, budget, money, etcetera, and all those things that play into a project. So it's good to know the back end of a system. If you're in our world and don't know the application too much, then you I would honestly spend spend a little bit of time learning what the system is capable of and understanding what your record systems can and can't do. Awesome. That's great. what ahead, points. Melanie. Yeah. So for the audience, I just opened a poll for everybody. We got a good idea of Mike and Rebecca's teams, but I'd love to know from those of you in the audience today, what exactly does your team look like that you're working on? So if you click on the poll tab, right at the top of the chat, you'll be able to see where you can submit your answers, and it looks like team of one or two to three people are greatly in the lead. Yeah. No robust team supporting the chat first. Not not not in this poll and not in. this audience today. No. Definitely not alone. No. We do we do have a few with eight or more. So So we got we got some slightly larger teams here, but, yeah, I'm not surprised to see those. smaller ones making up the the vast majority. Alright. So whenever the mandate is bigger than the time available, how do you guys decide what deserves the attention now, what needs to wait, and what you can defer to having ownership sit elsewhere. Whoever wants to jump in and start first, Sure. feel free. I can't go. I Go ahead. our side, Rebecca. yeah. I guess I I don't know. I know on our side we have so I mean, my backlog alone today has over ten thousand work hours in it for our team of two, if that tells you anything from our broad program overall. Now, right now, we are going through a lot of acquisitions. I have contractors in helping with that work. If for some reason engineering tells me those contractors go away, that work comes back into my lap. So we're balancing the work based on priority. Acquisitions are our biggest priority right now. But outside of that, it's compliance. Who is it a regulator, auditor who is coming at me from the outside regs that we have to abide by, and then it comes down to internal requirements. Is it legal coming knocking on the door because something needs to happen or we had this breach happen or something happened here? Is it something from an IT or security standpoint that we're implementing or had some vulnerability pop up that now we have to implement and change, and that can go into the physical side. It could hit the applications. You never know where what mandate is gonna pop up and throw a wrench into something, but it's those outside priorities that are top for me internal and our team wants. And I my Rebecca's little low light on wish list just keeps getting pushed further and further down the line, but it's all priority based and who needs something first if it comes down to the business. What is there is that justification and logic to drive the project work on the application side specifically from just what people want, what they need. Do they want AI implemented? Do they want a new feature? Do they want this? And that work still is people and resources, which we don't have many of on our development team from an application side as well. So we're really struggling the work based on the resources we have and just who's talking the loudest at a given time. Yeah. We're one of the lines where Rebecca just said, yes. The first, the first priority is, you know, if there's a a regulator knocking on work at work or, you know, an auditor or we turn our audit, we have to answer to that first. It's kind of a job everything. That doesn't happen too often, but anything that is related to ensuring firm compliance and maintaining our, you know, reputation in the marketplace, Yep. that's that's gonna absolutely strip, you know, that that's gonna rise to the top of the, to the top of the heap. But, you know, aside from that, how we, allocate resources really depends on our broader strategic objectives. And that's always changing, especially now, when we keep rolling out new iterations of our AI every couple of months. So we, you know, it's it's the old do more with less, which I know, my team. is sick of hearing, and I think everyone is pretty much sick of hearing, but it's the new normal. We're not, you know, change is gonna be constant. It's only gonna be, accelerating. This is probably gonna be the least, you know, change intensive day, for the rest of our lives because this is gonna get more and more professional. lives. This is gonna get more and more intense. So, beyond compliance, the next thing is, you know, keeping the lights on, making sure the applications are working, making sure we've removed barriers, whether it's access or, you know, provisioning or, any type of other, you know, electronic barrier, make sure that our, you know, our global resources have what they need to do their jobs. And then it's really about how we add value to a firm. And that's. where we really communicate quite a bit with, with our leadership because the firm's priorities, although the North Star is pretty constant, The the you know, the priorities that are needed can change, underneath that. So, we work regularly with our leadership teams to ensure that our priorities are in alignment, and that we can also demonstrate, quantify, our value to the larger organization. You know, although we're mainly a compliance function, you know, we, for example, we're rolling out a huge, upgrade to our document records management system. And this just isn't about, okay. Look. More functionality, same same application. Enjoy. No. We have to, we've had a lot of time working with our, with our user groups to understand how they're using the tool now, what they wanna see in the future, and how these changes and the upgrade are gonna impact them and build the communications plan around change managements. So, that's another hat we get to wear. So, really, those. those are our biggest, kind of our biggest, priorities. And then but we still have other initiatives. We're we're upgrading our enterprise retention schedule, which is which is a huge amount of work, that, Access has helped us. with. And, but, you know, sometimes we have to pause that when something else comes up. You know, one one example I can give of, you know, something we've had to kind of push back on and and and, you know, not take it is we, we're part of enterprise data governance. And so, it's not just governing records. It's also not record data. And, really, those lines I think we all know at this point. Those lines are pretty much blurred, to the point you really can't, almost distinguish them. And, we have, an initiative going to implement some retention on some big non data, applications. And, we certainly consulted on that. But when they said, okay, but there's gonna be people that just they're gonna need exceptions. You know, are you guys the ones to manage the exception process? And these are enterprise wide applications that really aren't under our ownership. So I had to push back and say no, and my leadership supported me, because we don't have the bandwidth. And we have, you know, literally, more important things to do. You know, we're making ourselves as efficient as possible. We're, you know, we're using our Copilot and our Gemini, and we're building box and agents and all that good stuff. But, again, we still have our limits. So, as long as we, keep the firm's goals and the firm's reputation at the top, that's that's kind of how we how we roll. Same. Completely agree, Mike. That's Sorry. Go ahead, Rebecca. yeah. It's just I was I was just adding in that it's completely where we're at. We're doing the same thing, and it just seems like we're so parallel just in in different worlds. So it just goes to show that we're all in this bucket together. And that's the one thing I love about Arma in these things when we do get on a call that you do realize you're not alone, and we're not out here tracking this water together and trying to tread and keep alive. We're constantly help and assistance for others and to lend that ear to and show where we do because it's all it's constant. It's the same things, just different industries. Exactly. Definitely. And I'm happy that we could create a space where people can come and listen to stories, share stories in the chat and examples, and get remember that feeling that, hey. We're not actually alone in this. We have people that we can reach out. to. So I love that. Now, Mike, you already believe it. Yeah. a little bit, and prioritization definitely works best whenever you can get the right people to share responsibility for the things that you're working on. So, like, what have you learned from partnering with enterprise data governance and the general counsel's office in your position? Yeah. I've learned that, to to an even higher level that what we do actually does affect a lot of people. And working with, for example, in in enterprise data governance, I've really had to understand how data governance, you know, both the similarities it has to, you know, the broader records and information governance for fashion. But they also have a very, it's really a field unto itself. In fact, my my my current book that I'm reading right now is, Noninvasive Data Governance Unleashed, which is not the sexiest title in the world. My family laughs at me. But, it's you know, there's and data governance is, in my view, a subset of information governance. And, but we have to understand how not just where data is. We have to understand where it's coming from, where it goes, how it's getting processed, who owns it, where it ends up. And and just as important, how many versions of it are out there? We are we are no different from anyone else in that, we we are constantly in ROT reduction mode. So I've learned quite a bit from enterprise data governance. And just as important, they've learned quite a bit from us. And it's important for all of us as practitioners because, the records profession is much older than the data governance profession. And, if you're old like me, you remember the days where, records departments were buried in the basement with, you know, 10,000 filing cabinets, and people are running around with, with their cards full of files and running back and forth. And, the the impression of records was these are the people who get files from us, but they also yell at us when we don't follow the rules. It's not really about yelling at people following the rules anymore. It's about partnering with them. Yep. It's about helping enable, I always say enable. We enable compliance versus, we, you know, we have a heavy handed approach. So, what helps us with core you know, collaborating with other departments is we all share you know, we all make sure we find the common ground. So we share the same firm objectives. We, we learn about their business. They learn a little bit about ours. And, you know, so we both have a vested interest. We make sure, when we're part of the department, they understand that we're, why we both have a vested interest and we're you know, we both share the same goals. I agree with that, Mike. And that's one thing we will always promote. It's not my it's not my data. I I say it all the time. Legal will tell me to say it too, but it's I'm here to provide the tools and the information to help you manage your data and information. But at the end of the day, it's the business decision, and they should be learning about it. So we're coming a long way here at least on our side at AAP to make them understand that they're valuable their information is valuable to them. It's they need to keep it cleaned, secured, protected, etcetera. Otherwise, it's just a file sitting on a shared drive out there that nobody knows about until it comes in and is managed, and it's only as good as the people who know about it in that case. So we constantly are trying to promote that good habit and the what and the why did it needs to be done because at the end of the day, they're not records managers. They just need to do their job and find the stuff at the end of the day, and it's a hassle for them in some cases in in the system. So I know at least on our side, we're looking at how to take a step back as we upgrade the system and go into the new one. So can we get back to the basics and go back to the basic principles of managing your data and not make it as complex as we need to be? And that's all stemming from years of history and legacy data that we just is out there. You guys know how much unstructured data is out there in the world and in our systems left and right, and we're just trying to get a handle on it. And we can't do that without the business whatsoever of being that stepping stone for us and helping us. I will say, Mike, it took us about two years to do our retention schedule update with access, but it's been the output after the fact has been nice because people know that the schedule exists now, they know we have one, they are looking at it every year, and they know that, okay, Rebecca's gonna come knocking on my door every May and ask me to update her if there's any changes to my schedule. So it's put that common denominator that they know that I'm knocking in that routine time frame and plays into the program in our areas that helps the business, how to help them even get us. And I love that you're connected to data governance. We've had we we've started some conversations on our side and had some conversations. We need to jump back into it, and that just pointed me and taken my notes down that I need to start jump by back in with our data governance team. There was so many people to cover. It's easy it's easy to forget about people because we work both work with small teams and large, and large organizations. Absolutely. Exactly. Speaking of partnering with different business units, Rebecca, which ones have you noticed have be kinda kinda become like your best friends or the ones that you're able to use to help you move different projects along or whatnot? It's funny because, honestly, it's our between our privacy team, when we started first started the retention schedule, They had an initiative going that we needed to know where their PII information was in the company. So as part of our retention schedule project with access, we double used our sword at the time and said, hey. We need to know from a privacy standpoint what this information where it is, and if it's any children's address, anything child related. So we used that project along with ours to hit hit them twice at one outing, so we didn't have to go knock on their door twice from two different people within our team. So we definitely are piggybacking on events. So right now that was privacy back then, we had our phishing team as a part of us too, so we do a lot with them. Our data protection and classification team, of course, we're heavy partners since they're on our same team, but outside, it's really our customer organization. Surprisingly, that they are always ready to step up and be a partner and help us get that pilot out or be a pilot person or help us with testing a process or documenting something and down of do we have what we need? Are they gonna set this stage? So while we have delayed rolling out program with them and doing some things, they're still a 100% checking in and saying, hey. We've we're almost through our reorg and a lot of things changing internally, of course, play into it. But customers, they're I I I love that they're always willing to help us. And legal, of course, always steps up to the plate that if I need something, I would say the two groups are legal always has my back and will be a partner to divvy up and be a guinea pig for something that we're wanna take forward to the company. And they don't. have plain bad copy either, which is great. Exactly. If I ever need that, we we we call it the legal hammer here. I don't know what everyone else. says, but if I need to pull out the legal hammer, we can, but they would. do it honestly without me. And if they're they're great. I like I said, I love our legal team, and they know what we're trying to accomplish and that we're trying to reduce the risk. And like you said talked about earlier, the rot, we has copies. We know we have copies, and it's one piece at a time. You can't wait. I know it's redundant and everybody hates hearing boil the ocean, but it's a true statement when it comes to records and just understanding what you have and the task to manage them is just one piece and one chunk every step of the way. Because if you try and do it all, it's not gonna you'll get overwhelmed, and people won't people will not like you if you just give a deadline and say, we're turning on retention and you have six months to do it. That did not go over with us very well when we did that for email retention many, many years ago that Rebecca is still getting beat up for that. we've gone down the email retention route and, I you know, we were working with our SharePoint, team internally. And, you know, they they were looking at all the technology, and I've I've been through it before in a previous stop, and I said, this is the technology is the easy part. The hard part is it's gonna be changing thirty years of bad behavior. Yep. They're. gonna have a lot of people who make a lot more money than us, saying how important they are and how the rules don't apply to them. That's that's the. hard part. Agreed. I will say just from a scheduling side, routine helps. I talked about annually. I don't change the start date of my retention review cycle unless I have to. So we've been doing it three years at work going this next year will be our third year, so they know I'm coming knocking on the door at certain times of the year for certain things. And I don't steer away from those scheduled timelines unless I have to. So at least they can try and play in their work and say, okay, Rebecca's just not gonna knock on my door and tell me she needs this done by next week. It's gonna she's gonna set this process starts here. I'm a custodian, so she'll keep me updated on the channel or within communication realm that I know Mike talked about it earlier, that OCM standpoint. We have that OCM, so we're constantly communicating through our methods as we know and what we know, and we actually have a quarterly content governance forum that anyone in the company could go to. And we put up every quarter and we put an agenda out, and invite anyone who wants to share it is more than happy to join that call when we just talk about something. This next one we're gonna do in November is all around DocuSight that we need to do we need to reeducate and pull some content management best practices out and remind folks that DocuSign is not a repository and that they need to move those types of information and those contracts and those signed documents into the system of record when they're done with it. So, This one said, doesn't even sit pick your. state. Exactly. So it's, like, it's those things that we try to keep people up to date of what we're doing and going through. And, yes, it's one more thing on my list, but it's that's the way that we make sure they're informed versus throwing them a wrench in the middle of the year to say, hey. You need to do a corporate separation audit or a user audit. It usually happens through our security team in February, so we we try to align a lot of the stuff that coincide with other standing tasks. Training happens certain times of the year or when we roll out new things, so it's really just trying to not burden them any more than we already are by making them store and manage their comp information. That's that's a real issue. I'm glad you brought that up, Rebecca, because that's a a real big issue that, I need to do better with, and that is, helping to reduce compliance fatigue across the firm because, audit we we we get audit we have so many audit departments. I don't even know what they do. But because we manage the firm's records, we get audited all the time. And I'm tired of them. There's this audit group, that audit group. And but I understand too that the people we're talking to, they're getting audited as sometimes, not as much. as us. But also too, we're knocking on our door. Enterprise data governance is knocking on our door. Privacy is knocking on our door. Privacy used to sit in enterprise data governance. Compliance snatched them up, so it's just us and our our Databricks team and our enterprise data governance group. And it's up to us to really, force the issue to, work with, privacy and enterprise data governance to see where we can combine efforts to reduce, so we can reduce compliance fatigue. Because if people get tired of seeing you, they're just not gonna answer your calls. And then, you know, then you're the law of a trial. Read. They definitely and I'm not gonna lie. There's times we knock where it it needs something because something happens, but we'd really try not to just throw something on our end users unless. we have to. Right. Yeah. Awesome. For the audience, I just opened up another poll because we're gonna start chatting about how to manage competing requests here really soon and would love to know what most often then slows down the important work in your organization. There's a few options in there. And if it's something else, feel free to go ahead and throw that in the chat. We'd love to know. But so far, it's kind of split, but competing business initiatives and manual processes are definitely in the lead. All of the above. Love it. I'm sure that's a common answer, Sarah. Definitely. Agreed. Yeah. So, Mike and Rebecca, how do you guys manage incoming requests so that everything that's urgent doesn't kinda, like, take ownership and erase all the important work that you're trying to do. So I know on my side, I do have a running backlog, and we have a weekly team meeting. And I say that lightly, but I will say it includes our IT development manager along with our legal counterpart in discovery that I work with day in and day out, honestly. That she and I talk a lot from a discovery and content perspective of looking things up and doing things in general that they often reach out to them and they'll point them my way from legal. But we really are just going hand in hand with what is coming in and really divvy that work up as it comes in from the business side. If somebody else can do it, the dev team will work on things. But my backlog, it's looked at. It's reviewed. We are constantly looking at it Friday. What needs to come up to the top of the list? Does anything need to change? What new work did we get this week? And really prioritizing it up from an application side. We have our applications in Jira, of course, and have the backlog managed within the application side, but our individual just teamwork I'm managing through tasks and within OneNote. And I have a OneNote for the team for IG that I share with those folks that I talked about, even not enter not even my immediate team of two that I share it with everybody on my team as well as well as legal and IT that they can get in there and see what is coming, what's new in the list. And I have a page for everything. So it's very detailed and down, and, like I said, the backlog at the end of the day includes it all, and we check and adjust each week. Jira Jira gives me gives me the pressure. I Thankfully, I'm not in it that much. My my co part sorry. owner. my team of two is on the application side, and he handles the applications for the most part. So I jump in from a mentee perspective and say, hey. You need help, but let let me give you some history because he's he's been here three years now. So he he's got a lot of catch up, but he'll ask questions here and there. So thankfully, I don't have to get in Jira as much Yeah. as I used. to, That's I used to live in it, and it was it's a it is anxiety driven a 100%. that's Stories, ethics. All of it. I'm like, what's the problem? How do we solve it? Yeah. And for us, that was a really good poll, by the way, Melody. It was really really was spread out. And, yeah, we do have to put out some fires. We try to, you know, of course, you know, we try to be like Smokey Bear and, you know, try to prevent fires. But, you know, we can't you know, we're 40,000, you know, member firms, so, we can't really do that consistently. So we have to determine what urgent really means. And, Great. again, I go back to that North Star. You know, if if it's, you know, for example, a partner who's all of a sudden you know, they can't get access to this workspace, you know, well, we will drop it and and get it, you know, get it going. But other you know, there's some other types of requests where, it's it's a lower priority. You know, it's not gonna no one's gonna die. No one's gonna lose billable hours. You know, things like that. But, we we will deprioritized noncritical projects. But, I saw one of the responses of, one of the categories for your full note, and it was, loss of well, I guess, unclear ownership. And that's, you know, in a firm with 40,000 people, you can only imagine that that's and and we're a pretty sophisticated. IT organization. But that still, we have not just our firm members, we also have, you know, various contractors working on various projects, the various different charge codes, in various different functions, and some were multiple functions. And you really have a I I go into so many meetings now where I have to figure out, like, the line of sight isn't clear. I'm like, what do these people do? Who do they belong to? Who are they important? You know, that type of thing. And so, that tells me also too, we gotta be transparent as possible on our end. And one. of the things we do do is we wanna make information as accessible, like, you know, routine questions, that type of stuff. How how to fix an issue, how to get in touch with us. We try to get that information out. We we have, for example, an AI chatbot on our on our, a SharePoint page, where people can go in and ask questions to get their answers. So, you know, to minimize our time, you know, it, you know, minimizes our time, but also helps our internal customers get their answers quicker. So not only do we have to do priorities, but we also try to look to where, we can do more with less, where we can provide the information, where we can leverage our technological tools, to set you know, to to help out our customer base. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that. I will say we have an internal Internet page and Internet set up, and we every piece of information governance from the life cycle from start to finish as a dedicated page of what to do, and we put that out there that a lot of people don't know it's there. I'm not gonna lie, but the people that do know that it's there and that's and I know I can point people to it and say, hey. It's out on our web page. Go grab the documentation. Or if you need to if you need to know what's acceptable to throw in the shredding bin, the documents out there. It lists what's acceptable, what's not, our process of how to store a box, there's videos, there's walk step by step walk throughs, there's everything we have that we do as a program. We've created that one stop shop to get people to the web page to have a first starting point. But I always tell people to it's with the retention schedule. It's if you're spending more than two or three minutes looking through our retention schedule to see if you have a if your record you have in your hand has met retention or not, and you can't find it in two or three minutes, you're not going to. And you pick up the phone and call me, and don't waste time trying to figure out where it goes because that's what we're here for. We're here our team is all support. We are not here for anything beyond supporting our internal customers along with making sure they have the tools to support the external customer. So we truly look at it at that same standpoint of we're customer focused. We will if we don't know the answer, if we can't point you to it, by golly, we will find somebody who can or we'll look into getting the tools and the information that you need available to you or by them if there's some process that you wanna do and we don't have it in play, which I would challenge them to find something on that at this point, honestly, because we have we have a lot that's available to the end users if they come out and look at it. It's a lot like I said, the hard bad fact is just that a lot of people don't know we exist within our company and that there's people like us in my team to help and drive them to where they need to go to find the information. Yeah. That's if I should brought that up, Rebecca, that's a good point. We, you know, we a lot of times, we will get questions that don't belong to us. But we do have to find the right person. Nothing raises my blood pressure more at work than, putting in a request for something that helped us or what have you. And maybe you just get a ticket declined, not our area. That just that that. that will just ruin my day. So, we you know, we also you were talking about how you have those communication sessions, Rebecca, and that is huge. We, you know, we are not the top priority of the corporate communications department at KPMG, so we have to get the word out otherwise. And and so we rely on our records liaisons. We're constantly trying to update our liaison roster. We have quarterly meetings. And in our quarterly meetings, we start right usually, we start right in the, you know, with the portal page. Like, okay. Hey. Now on our portal page, you can do this, you can do this, you can get an answer to this. You know, or if we or some people in the department, you know, aren't sure. This is the link. This is how you get there. So we're constantly, having to do that because the firm is not static. People come people go. The firm restructures every five minutes. So we do have. to, you know, we do have to constantly repeat ourselves, get the word out, but, we know that we're saving ourselves work. And more importantly, we're also, helping the firm achieve its objectives by making sure, that, people know, you know, what retention schedule is, how to, you know, become compliant, what how to perform a, retention review, etcetera. Yep. So before we move into audience q q and a, because I see there's a few questions in there, I just wanna touch on the hot topic of AI here real quick. So, Rebecca and Mike, how have the both of you leveraged AI in your work? Can you give us an example? So I will I I I can't wait to hear Mike's answer, but mine has been novice. I will tell you my most recent, the one thing that I am constantly throwing in there is pictures of my boxes. So it used to take a long time to index a box before I send it off-site to storage. And the one thing right now that I will do and tell you is I take a picture of the box, I throw it into Copilot, and I tell it to create me an index of the box contents, and it's been spot on. I still check. So, I mean, it is today, I did 30 boxes for the HR that popped up, and they respond the HR respond legal responded by it. It's like, you indexed it already. And it's like it's like Copilot. It's like, it was I I love it. Verify it. Check it. I'm terrified from a data perspective from our company of the being ready, but the things it's doing for me, we're doing audit checks and taking spreadsheets and matching. It's creating and updating my program documents and helping me tell me what I'm in my and I I mentioned earlier before we jumped on this call, I'm revamping all our program documents and to be compliant with NIST, ARMA, and ISO fifteen four eighty nine, and went from a 40% plus or minus compliance rate of what the policy was prior to a 96% after getting some. recommendation from Copilot to add some sections in, and then I tweaked and we're working through with the team and reviewing what it put out. So it's definitely has its perks. Again, I will verify, verify, verify. Do not trust that it gets it right, and make sure that if you use a picture, you don't have two arms, two heads, or two hands type of thing in the pictures. But, I mean, I use it where and give credit where it's due that it has helped us tremendously. I can't wait till I get some time to sit down and build some agents that I can share out with the company that my goal was to get this index out as an agent that everybody could do. We're in the middle of office renovations and everybody's moving with the directive to not nothing goes in off-site storage that we digitize or purge or verify that it's electronic in the system. So there's a lot of initiatives with it. We're trying to do share drive and department level cleanup item next year. We just bought info I'll plug InfoTection for you guys too along working alongside with access and our retention schedules. Of down those two work hand in hand. So we're gonna start doing discovery and start tackling these repositories. So it's going to be a long process, but we're ready to start the first of the year with our customer organization that has volunteered and said, yeah, we'll be the guinea pig. We'll help you and come forward. So that's our stepping stone for '27 and beyond is just to start tackling these repositories one by one and getting rid of the rot and only saving what we need to save. So big journey coming up for us. Awesome. Wow. And that's and that's, and, Rebecca, I just wrote down that, that idea about just taking the photos for for indexing that. Love it. is brilliant. Although we, It's great. Dave David and Gus, if you're on here listening, guess what? No. The no. That's interesting, because we don't process, you know, much paper anymore, but we do still have two offices where we have records holdings in locked rooms. Soon, there'll be one by the end of this month, but that material is gonna be be indexed, and that's not done easily. So that's a very that's a great use case. I I love it. another another use case that goes hand in hand is you can then upload your retention schedule in Copilot, and it will also tell you what the boxes met retention, and it's been pretty accurate against it too. But I I have put a couple plugs into access on the backside of the retention in with Unify to see if we can get some built in AI going in down for future direction with them as well because I detect what I'm seeing in my in just basic Copilot for our company, I there we can do some big things with boxes and physical records and just retention in general. It's just you have to you have to trust it and train it and verify it that I I will say it all the time, verify, verify. About question. Yeah. That's that's our job. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It and, Faith, I see that I saw the message just go in the chat. It seemed too good to be true, but it's I trust it. Take a picture. Verify it, and in my case, I will say it gives me a high, medium, low whether they captured the hand I mean, it's done handwritten numbers and on the outside of boxes too. So, I mean, I didn't believe it would be as good as it is, and it is pre it is went above and beyond what I ever expected it to do from a full blown records person and being in this world for as long as I have. I didn't expect Copilot to be as good at what it's doing, but it's it's it's been great. I'm not it surprised me. It's come a long way, baby. Yes. Yes. Copilot was atrocious at first. Yes. But, yeah. It's, it's gotten a lot better. And, you know, aside from all the, you know, the usual Copilot stuff, we, and I've mentioned that, you know, we have a little place on our portal where people can ask questions. We have a little corpus, you know, where it, you know, provides answers. But, internally, we, one of our the team members worked with us, and she developed, a really good agents to, analyze, inventories. So, you know, Yep. we're still working. with some inventories, and, it's been spreadsheet driven largely to this point. And, so now instead of having, you know, one of our team members go in one by one by one by one to see, oh, is this record not a record? What's retention? What what what's the policy to do? The agent does that, and it does it quite well. We still we still verify everything, but that has been a huge time saver. And, for our next fiscal year, one of our goals is to mobilize out across the firm. So instead of asking our, you know, our internal customers to, perform a, you know, an inventory update or, you know, things like that, and and type it in on a spreadsheet, we hope to roll out a tool that'll allow them, allow the agent to scan their their little mini ecosystem and complete the inventory and send it over to us and save them. time. But one, one one AI, related, story here, with access is that, yes, Samantha and her team did a wonderful job, in, giving us the blueprint for what will be our new retention schedule. We just have to convince, a lot of other people to to accept some of these new recommendations. That's that's the hard part. But we still had to draw a crosswalk between, old and new. And, you know, even though we exported everything, it's not not as easy as it sounds. So I and my crowning achievement in in in in Copilot so far is that I I created a script, to take, the old, you know, the current retention schedule, map it to the, the function, and then the new, and then the new policy. And that has saved, a ton of time. So that's my one my little personal one, but we are working for some you know, on some big fish as well. That's awesome. Yep. I'm, jealous. we've run out of time for the audience q and a, so I, will. Oh my gosh. our best. I didn't get us to away, follow-up me. yeah. with you guys. I know. Time flies. Like, this was a great discussion. An hour went quick today. It lie. sure did. So thank you so much, Rebecca and Mike. Wonderful insights. I'm I honestly have some stuff to take back for myself to think about. Jennifer from Arma, thank you so much to Arma for helping us with this webinar, and hopefully, we'll see you at InfoCon or a future webinar. So thank you so much, everybody. I will be at Arma. Yes. Thanks, I'll. see you there. Yep. Have a good one, bye. guys. Thank you.