Title: Complying with the Law:
Author: xxxxxx
Last saved by: David Bearman
Company: Archives & Museum Informatics

Electronic Records Research 1997: Resource Materials
Compilation Copyright, Archives & Museum Informatics 1998
Article Copyright, Author

Transient Compound Document (TCD)
 
A New Type Of Business Document 
That Needs To Be Managed

by Robert F. Williams
The Transient Compound Document (TCD) is a new type of business record that needs to be managed.  What is a TCD?  How did it come into existence?  Why are TCDs important?  How should they be managed?
•	The Legal Need for TCDs.  Records are created in anticipation of future disputes -- to record activities/transactions at or near the time of their occurrence and thereby establish a people-independent memory of those events.  For every business, its records constitute the “corporate memory.”  Historically, with the increase in both the volume of business activities and the length of time those activities have to be available for recall, the reliance on records has become increasingly essential to achieving accuracy, reliability and trustworthiness in the recollection of facts and the reconstruction of activities and events.
	This recollection process first sought to prove the positive -- to retrieve from a large number of records a few needed records.  For example, to locate a signed shipping ticket showing the receipt of goods and, therefore, the legal obligation to pay for them.  Now, in our ever increasingly regulated and litigious society, there is also a need to prove the negative.  Records are vitally important to proving the negative because they can demonstrate, through document-based information, that a pattern of behavior was so consistent as to preclude the possibility of any validity to an allegation of process wrong-doing.  Although one of the basic tenets of America’s judicial system is innocence until proven guilty, that is not the case with regulatory compliance.  Through a company’s records, it must be able to demonstrate that the company did not do what it is alleged to have done by the regulatory agency.  It is this increasing need to prove the negative that is the basis for TCDs.
•	What Are TCDs?  New business practices have served as the primary impetus for creating new types of records.  Some examples are production speed as the driving force behind the development of continuous form computer reports, file integrity for laboratory research notebooks and complexity of detail for engineering drawings.
	With the advent of checks in the early part of the century, banks had a business need to create a transient document -- a copy of a check as it was cleared.  Since the original check document was promptly returned to the originator, banks had to be able to document their processing activities, thereby giving birth to the microfilm industry.  Now, many billions of these transient documents are created every year.  TCDs carry the logic of the transient document into today’s window-based computer world.
	Let us hypothesize that many or all of the individual windows in a window-like computer display contain information from active, dynamic databases that could, and probably would, change in each subsequent display.  People viewing such displays of multiple, dynamic databases have made important decisions that later were relevant to litigation.
	Can the facts that were the basis for a decision be recalled to prove either the positive or, more likely, the negative?  Without TCDs, the answer is No.  This is because the contents of each of the multiple databases has long since changed many times following the original display on which a particular decision was based.  Thus, there is no corporate memory to defend the basis for a decision that is now in legal dispute.  In essence, those people in the legal and compliance departments who are responsible for defending a business’ actions have nothing to clearly document the reasons for the actions in question.  As a result, there is a very significant business risk -- one that needs to be addressed.
	If a person viewing the original window display of multiple databases had the capability to “freeze” that display and then retain it for possible future reference, a transient compound document would be created.  Individually, a TCD can provide valuable information about the basis for a decision.  Collectively, TCDs can detail a pattern of behavior and provide a basis for proving the negative.  TCDs can be critically important in providing documentary evidence regarding credit approval, engineering design and electric power operations, to name just a few.  As the use in business of window-type displays of multiple databases expands, an increasing number of important decisions will be made based on such displays, and the need for TCDs to document those decisions will grow accordingly.
•	Managing TCDs.  TCDs are easy to create.  They can either be automatically created by a computer system or selectively created by the individual viewing the original display.  Because they record a computer display, TCDs are electronic records; therefore, they should be retained in their native digital format on either optical or magnetic storage.  And since TCDs are likely to be created chronologically by function in response to a keyed-in criteria request, file organization would likely be by function and, within that, by time -- and the indexing could be automatic.
The challenge of TCDs is not in managing them; that part is easy.  Nor is it in capturing them; a relatively simple software change will make that also easy to do.  The real challenge is in understanding the need for TCDs -- the significant business risk of not creating them -- and then identifying what decisions in your business need to be documented with TCDs.