Who's responsible for records management?

Written by David Tebbutt in September 2005

At a recent Butler Group conference on document and records management, research analyst Richard Edwards made the astonishing claim that over 70 percent of records management professionals believe that IT was responsible for management of corporate documents and records. He coupled it with a further claim that over 60 percent of the same people claim that IS/IT don't understand the organisation's document lifecycle.

If true, this suggests a fault line at the centre of organisations. How can you make a department responsible for something that it is largely clueless about?

The source of the statistics was the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) which received more than 2,200 survey responses from records management professionals, largely in the USA. The two relevant questions from the survey are: "Who has primary responsibility for the day-to-day management of electronic records in your organization?" and, "Do you believe that IS/IT at your organization really understands the concept of 'life cycle' regarding the management of your organization's electronic records?"

It's little wonder that a bunch of records management professionals responded the way they did. The insertion of "day-to-day" into question one, and the leading nature of question two pretty much guaranteed the headline-grabbing results. Yet the survey still raised serious issues regarding records management. Who is in charge? Who is responsible? And the answer, all too often, is 'no-one in particular'.

IS/IT exists to advise on industry developments and to provide technical support for an organisation's policies. In an area as important as records management, it cannot possibly lay down the strategy and choose the solutions. It's all too easy, and quite wrong, to have document and records management strategies determined by the soothsayers of the software industry.

Records managers on their own can't determine the company's policy, although they can have a big hand in determining the implementation strategy. In these times of massive, and increasing, regulatory and legislative pressures, an organisation needs to arrange its affairs so that it can respond to any enquiry or investigation in a timely and efficient manner.

It's no good looking at the latest bunch of regulations and tweaking the system to suit. This way lies madness. A records management policy should be determined at the highest levels of an organisation and an appropriate budget be assigned to it. Successfully implemented, such a policy will cut administration costs as well as leaving the organisation ready to respond to any external challenge. Compliance ceases to be an external requirement, subject to the whims of regulators and politicians; it becomes an internal and consistent requirement which reflects the values and principles of the organisation. It's called good governance. It puts management back in charge.

Paper records have a long history and are probably reasonably well managed. But companies must also get serious about retention schedules and migration of electronic information to sustainable media and formats. According to AIIM, 47 percent of organisations do not include electronic records in their retention schedules. Over half of those surveyed think that IS/IT has no idea that it has to migrate electronic records to different media from time to time. At the risk of trivialising the issue, what would you do with a dBASE II file on a 5-1/4" floppy disk?

Records, both electronic and paper, are the documentary evidence of a company's decisions and activities. Every person in the organisation needs to be aware of their importance and to modify their working practices for the greater good. This is definitely not an IS/IT matter. This is a culture change that can only be formulated at the top and driven by information professionals.