Organizational aspect of trusted legally valid long-term electronic archive solution

Due to increase of electronic business and business process dematerialization organizations are facing today a problem of preserving vast amounts of electronic documents in coherent and trustworthy manner. A large amount of digital documents are produced every day even in small and medium-sized companies. The documents range from simple receipts to complex legal contracts and service level agreements. Many such documents need to be stored and preserved for longer period of time. Some services and technical solutions providing long term proofs of authenticity, integrity and non-repudiation of electronic documents are available on the market today. In order for these technical electronic archiving solutions and services to be successfully adopted by organizations they need to be deployed in a proper operational and organizational manner. Beside this organization needs to establish required operational procedures and to operate in accordance with them to assure that trusted electronic archive is legally valid. In this paper we present the first set of organizational approaches that organizations need to utilize in order to successfully integrate the operational and legal aspects of electronic archiving and to change the business processes accordingly. Following the approach of pattern oriented organizational design we capture the organizational trusted archiving solutions and best practices in the form of patterns, providing the context of the problem, the generic solution captured in the form of organizational diagrams, and preconditions that need to be met by the organization, and dependencies on other patterns are described. Finally the paper presents implementation of the generic solution to different organizations’ contexts and indicates influence of different applications of the pattern to further solution development. Key-Words: electronic archive, long-term preservation, security, legal compliance, durable integrity, durable authenticity, organizational patterns