A clean records environment is everything. As teams spread across departments, locations, and time zones in distributed work environments, records tend to follow, ending up on shared drives, cloud platforms, personal folders, and collaboration tools. What may have started as a relatively contained system gradually becomes more distributed, shaped by where and how people work. Add growth and mobility into the mix, and things can start to feel less predictable.
We invited Mike Francis, Director of RIM Compliance at Diamondback Energy, and Eric Schmitz, Enterprise Director of Access Unify, to talk through these challenges in our webinar “Strengthening Control of Your Records Across Distributed Teams.”
Mike Francis started things off by summing up the core issue: “Distributed teams plus growth equals records scattered across systems… there’s no trusted source of truth,” he said.
In practice, the fragmentation of records data shows up in familiar ways. Teams lose visibility into what records actually exist, or where the most current version can be found. Structures evolve inconsistently, reflecting local habits rather than shared standards. Over time, those small inconsistencies can add up, making it harder to manage risk around compliance, retention, and governance.
Regaining control doesn’t require starting over. But it does require a more intentional approach to how records are organized, accessed, and governed across a distributed environment.
What makes distributed records challenging isn’t a single issue. Rather, it’s the way several small, familiar problems start to layer on top of each other and stack up over time.
Records live in distributed work environments across multiple systems and locations, often for practical reasons. But that spread makes it harder to see the full picture. Duplicate versions begin to circulate. Ownership can be unclear or shift as roles and teams evolve. Without shared structure, people fall back on what they know, relying on informal or “tribal” knowledge to find what they need.
It creates a never-ending cycle, said Mike Francis: “You’re constantly chasing your tail… trying to figure out where it lives, who owns it. It’s a challenge just trying to find out who knows where things are, as well.”
Individually, these issues might feel manageable. Together, they create operational drag, slowing down everyday work.
Before governance can really take hold, there must be a basic level of clarity. Not perfect visibility, but enough understanding to work from a shared baseline.
That usually starts with a few key questions: What records actually exist? Where are they stored? And how are they classified, if at all? Without that foundation, it becomes difficult to apply any kind of structure in a consistent way.
As Eric Schmitz explained, “If you don’t know what you have—what’s in the box or what’s in the documents you’re storing digitally—you can’t have a records program.”
When that visibility is limited, retention policies and compliance efforts become difficult to apply consistently. Some records are managed carefully while others fall through the cracks, and over time the gaps widen.
There’s a growing interest in using AI tools to help surface and organize information, and they can be useful in that role. But they’re only as effective as the environment they’re working in. If records aren’t well defined or consistently structured, those tools can end up reinforcing the same inconsistencies—just at a faster pace.
This webinar explores how you can leverage digitization to bring structure and transparency to complex records environments while maintaining visibility into both digital and physical assets.
When records are properly indexed, they become easier to work with across the board. Teams can locate information more quickly, ownership is easier to establish, and retention policies can be applied with more confidence and consistency. Instead of reacting to gaps or scrambling to track things down, records management starts to feel more structured and intentional.
This applies to records of all types, as Eric Schmitz reminded us, from data to soil samples to pathology slides. “There are all sorts of different types of records out there,” he said. “And they’re not just documents. But they all can be indexed and they all can be inventoried appropriately based off of those indexes.”
Proper indexing also has implications for how newer tools are used. Indexing doesn’t just make retrieval easier; it creates the conditions for automation and smarter discovery. Without it, systems—including AI tools—have a much harder time consistently interpreting what records are and how they should be handled.
Control improves when records management is treated less like a series of individual tasks and more like a coordinated program. Instead of relying on isolated efforts, the focus shifts to how decisions are made, shared, and applied across the organization.
That kind of approach usually requires alignment across a few key groups: legal, IT, and the business teams. Each brings a different perspective, from compliance requirements to technical realities to day-to-day operational needs. Bringing those together isn’t always simple, but it’s what makes policies workable in practice.
“You need legal, IT, and the business at the table… it’s a balancing act,” explained Mike Francis.
When that alignment is in place, records management becomes more resilient, better able to keep pace as systems evolve and teams grow.
Even with the right intent, governance doesn’t necessarily translate cleanly into execution. Ownership may sit centrally, but responsibility is distributed across teams, often without consistent visibility. When business teams aren’t fully engaged, or when processes aren’t embedded in daily workflows, gaps start to naturally emerge.
Over time, it becomes clear that effective programs can’t rely on a single point of control—they depend on shared responsibility that is practical, visible, and integrated into how work actually happens.
To improve control of your records processes, follow a structured, step-by-step approach rather than trying to fix everything at once.
Mike Francis offered some advice on how to get started on this type of approach:
In the journey towards a structured records system, reducing records volume isn’t the goal. What matters more is building a system that supports visibility, reliable retrieval, and consistent governance—especially as organizations scale and spread out.
Real progress usually comes from prioritizing a few core principles:
When those elements are in place, records management becomes less about chasing issues and more about maintaining a stable, usable framework for information.
Want to hear more? Watch the full webinar recording to learn how practitioners across distributed work environments are approaching visibility, governance, and control in real-world programs.
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