Newsletter: Future Fetched!

New Year, New Reporting Structure

We look forward to 2024 as a year of change. And change is good. You can’t improve without change. For Records Management Services, this means we are starting 2024 positioned for progress and greater success. After many years of reporting through UW Finance, we are now part of Compliance and Risk Services. We are grateful to UW Finance for their support and collegiality over these past years. We look forward to working with our colleagues in CRS in building an even stronger more integrated infrastructure to support the UW in meeting its compliance responsibilities.

Celebrate National Clean Out Your Computer Day with the ROT Squad

The ROT Squad has helped a wide variety of offices clean up their shared drives, and they’ve seen it all. In honor of National Clean-out Your Computer Day, attend this live demo of how to find common types of ROT that often lurk in shared electronic storage locations. Afterwards, you’ll surely be inspired to get started cleaning out records yourself.

When: Thursday, February 8, 2-3 p.m.

Where: Zoom link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/93125445768

Click here to add to your Outlook calendar

Fetching the Future

Back in January 2020, which seems a good hundred years ago, after having reviewed our annual Records Center statistics, we realized that we were seeing a strong trend moving away from paper and toward electronic records. With additional research it became clear that the UW was on a fast track to going paperless. With Workday and other central systems, with electronic forms and electronic signatures, more and more records are being created and received electronically. And at Records Management we could not be more supportive of this change. So after much brainstorming on what the future holds and how we could help move the UW forward we came up with what we started calling our 2022 Initiative which has evolved into Fetch the Future—Rethink the Ink.

Hard to believe it’s been four years since our initial idea and two years since we hit our Fetch the Future milestones. In February 2022 we successfully closed down the University Records Center to new boxes, although of course we will continue to manage the boxes we already have in storage, including file/box retrievals and dispositions.

As part of our Fetch the Future initiative we created a number of new resources focusing on managing electronic records including our So, You Want To Go Digital? video, resources on organizing and naming electronic files and documents, choosing a third party cloud vendor, and planning your Ideal State for electronic records workflows. We continue to add to these resources, most recently with the Electronic Record Policy Builder. You can find all this and more in our Fetch the Future Hub.

We continue working with UW partners such as UW-IT’s Enterprise Document Management (EDM) team, which manages UW’s Document Management System (DMS), powered by DocFinity. The Document Management System provides a compliant, secure and easily searchable centralized location to manage electronic records. We have worked to ensure that financial records are managed either in Workday or in DocFinity so that you don’t have to keep local departmental copies of records attached to Workday. We also continue focusing on managing e-records with creative ideas like hosting regular Deleting Parties and our new Expedition Into Unstructured Data workshop which helps you deal with shared directories. We continue focusing on communication—schedule a Going Digital Consult-- as we work to identify any last gasp roadblocks keeping you from fully going digital—and remove them. And of course, we always have our Scanning Policy Builder available to help you take that last step to get rid of legacy paper.

The years since January 2020 have not been easy, but we made it through. And look at all we accomplished. We’ve made a lot of progress on Fetching the Future. The Ink has been Rethink-ed. We look forward to the next few years and are excited to see what Fetching the Future will look like as we learn to better navigate this digital world.

Trivia Question of the Month

It’s the end of one era and the beginning of a new, exciting one. Records Management Services has gone through many transitions and changes over the last few decades. As of January 2024, our office is no longer part of UW Finance and we’ve transitioned over to Compliance and Risk Services. On that occasion we thought it would be fun to center our monthly question on this most recent transition.

For how many years was Records Management Services part of UW Finance?

1. 5
2. 10
3. 15
4. 20

Want to challenge your co-worker(s)? Feel free to forward this email to them and see if they know the answer. Scroll down to see the answer below.

FETCH THE FUTURE...GO DIGITAL
Click here to watch the video on this new University-wide initiative.