Records Management - Current Issues in Records Management

Current Issues in Records Management

As of 2005, records management has increased interest among corporations due to new compliance regulations and statutes. While government, legal, and healthcare entities have a strong historical records management discipline, general record-keeping of corporate records has been poorly standardized and implemented. In addition, scandals such as the Enron/Andersen scandal, and more recently records-related mishaps at Morgan Stanley, have renewed interest in corporate records compliance, retention period requirements, litigation preparedness, and related issues. Statutes such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act have created new concerns among corporate "compliance officers" that result in more standardization of records management practices within an organization. Most of the 1990s has seen discussions between records managers and IT managers, and the emphasis has expanded to include the legal aspects, as it is now focused on compliance and risk.

Privacy, data protection, and identity theft have become issues of interest for records managers. The role of the records manager to aid in the protection of an organization's records has often grown to include attention to these concerns. The need to ensure that certain information about individuals is not retained has brought greater focus to records retention schedules and records destruction.

The most significant issue is implementing the required changes to individual and corporate culture to derive the benefits to internal and external stakeholders. Records management is often seen as an unnecessary or low priority administrative task that can be performed at the lowest levels within an organization. Publicised events have demonstrated that records management is in fact the responsibility of all individuals within an organization and the corporate entity.

An issue that has been very controversial among records managers has been the uncritical adoption of Electronic Document and Records Management Systems (EDRMS). One well known RM thinker, Steve Bailey, has stated:

"As far as the average user is concerned, the EDRMS is something they didn’t want, don’t like and can’t use. As such, its no wonder that so few users accept them – as one person once said to me “making me use an EDRMS is like asking a plasterer to use a hammer!

"And now, finally, it is time to turn our eyes to the records management profession itself. In my opinion, we have come within a whisker of allowing our blind obsession with EDRMS to turn us into an intellectually-sterile, vendor-led profession. For the best part of a decade we have allowed others to do the thinking for us and have come to rely on EDRMS as our intellectual-crutch. But make no mistake about it, the blame for this rests squarely with us. Like children following the Pied Piper, we allowed ourselves to be so enchanted by the tune being played that we were led, without question or debate, wherever the technology took us." ( RMS Debate: The case against EDRMS Has EDRMS been a success? The case for the prosecution, RMS Conference, Edinburgh 22 April 2007)

Another issue of great interest to records managers is the impact of social media, such as wikis, Facebook and Twitter, on traditional records management practice, principles, and concepts.

Related topics of current note include information lifecycle management and enterprise content management.