Crawling for Compliance

To help insurers manage records and meet compliance goals, FileNet (Costa Mesa, Calif.) released FileNet Records Crawler, a rules-based solution that helps manage e-mail, documents and software throughout all C drives within the network of an organization. "The greatest threat to an insurer is litigation, and the biggest risk is unmanaged content," says Craig Rhinehart, director of compliance markets and products for FileNet. "Users save copies of important policies on their computers, and ... several versions of the same policy are floating around."

Records Crawler works in conjunction with FileNet's enterprise content management (ECM) platform, FileNet P8. Once corporate standards for records management are entered into the rules of the P8 platform, Records Crawler locates and identifies redundant documents and software on every computer within an insurer's IT environment. Records Crawler then files the identified records for company retention and places proxies on the users' computers, ensuring that carriers can find, produce and authenticate records when needed.

According to FileNet, the solution, which was released in January, also minimizes the risk of user-related error, reduces costs and enhances productivity. "[It] enforces business policy and forces employees to be compliant without deploying new software, training or interruption," Rhinehart says.