Electronic Records Management Lags Everywhere
The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) has published an illuminating if gloomy report based on a survey of almost 800 members earlier this year. It shows that electronic records management still lags badly behind paper records management (which means that records management lags badly the state of play in the world), and has some worrying figures and facts:
- Only 45% of respondents had a single set of policies to cover both physical and electronic records (meaning there’s scope for losing management visibility between the gaps)
- IT is usually entrusted with electronic records recovery eg for legal discovery, whereas records managers look after the physical records
- 55% had no policy guidance on the status of emails as electronic records
- Almost half of respondents said their e-records were “unmanaged”
- 60% could not confidently assert that they had processes and systems in place to protect the integrity and reliability of their e-records
The bulk of responses came from North America, and it would have been good to get deeper insight into Australia, New Zealand and the UK, where slightly different traditions of records management hold sway.
How does this relate to knowledge management? Well if you can’t manage your records, you can’t manage your memory. It’s time for records managers, content managers and knowledge managers to stop skirting each other looking for disciplinary boundaries, and start getting to grips with the common challenge they face.
Here is the link to the full report, which is available for free (you’ll need to register as a site member first). There’s also a short online self assessment tool. Try it.
5 Comments so far
- Patrick Lambe
Agreed! So how do we break these imaginary but powerful barriers?
- Bill Proudfit
It’s about community development and breaking down the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome. Foster the cross-fertilization of ideas, education, vocabulary between the various groups. This is happening and there are many examples. It needs to happen at both the external professional/academic level and at the internal organizational level.
Agree with Bill.
I think the ability to break down barriers is related to how companies approach project management and utilize communities of practice.
Got poor project management? Then companies won’t have metrics to understand why projects fail and understand the cause/effect relationship between imaginary barriers & poor e-records management. Sometimes it takes the failure of a company wide project to get this out in the open.
Have good project management and good communities of practice? Then work is focused on getting things done using cross-functional teams that help break down barriers. The impact of poor e-records management can be measured and reflected in risk assessment. Communities of practice create new communication channels and make it easier to find team members.
In a broader context, I’d be interested in whether the report examines the impact of external regulations on KM practices. Industries such as Life Sciences have stringent e-record policies due to external standards imposed by the FDA or the EU. One downstream impact is global harmonization of e-record policies and SOPs which begins to reduce difference between countries.
Hi Patrick
I’m being lazy and responding without reading the actual article yet. You raise the potential for a different response had the survey been conducted in Aust / NZ and the UK to it having been done in the US. True enough. There may have been a different outcome had too if a istinction is made between private and government enterprsies in any of the jurisdictions. EDRMS (enterprise, or electronic if you will, document and records management sytems) are commonly employed in Aust / NZ and UK in government agencies - and I suspect probably in the US too. One, among many of the things we need which others have touched on, is good integration between line of business systems and EDRMSs to facilitate the automated capure of documentation and contact information from those systems.
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The division between Content Management, Information Management, Knowledge Management, Library Science and Records Management is more imaginary than real. It is a kind of self-protection. This is part of the reason there is such poor electronic records management and such poor explicit knowledge management in organizations. There are many more examples.
Posted on October 27, 2009 at 11:43 AM | Comment permalink