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The academic advisors working at University of Oklahoma’s College of Arts & Sciences were operating behind the times. While the students were using technology in every aspect of their lives, the college’s academic services office—which handles more than 8,000 student records—was still hopelessly ensnared in a traditional paper system, says Rhonda Dean-Kyncl, assistant dean for academic services.

Mobile technology has certainly made life more convenient, allowing employees to work and stay connected from almost anywhere. At the same time, because these devices are so portable and are often used by accessing public wireless internet, they’ve made life a little less secure.

College and university records administrators are increasingly under the gun to meet regulatory and compliance mandates pertaining to document retention and security. This would be no big deal if they just had to track and control a couple of documents (and if these documents were all pretty much the same) but of course, this is hardly the case.

Although the medical school’s old system of managing records with paper spreadsheets and custom databases was working fine, keeping things current did depend on programmer availability, says Monica Baccardax, IT project manager for the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University Medical School, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. And even when all systems were “go,” staying on top of the paper flow was time-consuming.

Imagine the life of a university or college records manager or compliance officer. Facing an almost uncountable number of federal and state document management requirements that grow more complex by the day, they’re somehow expected to stay on top of these regulations, and to ensure that every document accurately adheres to them. Any failure to do so puts a university system at a high risk of being out of compliance.