Why Your Organisation Needs Effective Records Management

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Records management has been around for a long time. When the first person was nominated to paint a scene on the wall of a cave, records management as a profession came into being.

For hundreds of years the practice of keeping records fell to those who were nominated to do so. It wasn’t the job of everyone; certain people in an organisation held the responsibility of capturing records and managing them through their lifecycle.

The introduction of technology in the workplace was a significant change in this process and records management as a profession.  As soon as everyone had a computer, it became impossible for a small team of people to manage all the content that was being created. Records management needed to be pushed to the user.

Big systems were built to house all the electronic records, very much in the same way we had originally managed physical records. We asked users to work in one place, but store, save and retrieve somewhere else. And users were not impressed.

They consistently found ways around this constraint, first via file shares and more recently via document sharing apps like Dropbox. This unbridled group sharing was an absolute nightmare for records managers (I mean, we’re all dreaming about records management, right?).

Today, we’re on the precipice of another great change in records management. This time, however, we have the advantage of technology to facilitate these changes.

Records managers everywhere are looking at how they can incorporate records management into standard business processes while hiding the controls from the end user. Rather than asking users to use an unfamiliar or counterintuitive system, we’re building it into the business applications where the user works and where the information is being created.

Learn more about this topic at the Digital Records and Information Management Conference in Canberra, AU on 24th & 25th July, I’ll be there the first day giving a presentation on “Records Management: A Digital Whirlwind.”

AvePoint will also be running the round table session on records management in Office 365 and SharePoint at the event. We will walk you through the benefits, features and risks associated with moving to the platforms. We will also touch on the new secure data centre Microsoft has launched in Canberra.

Look forward to seeing you there!

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