What is Records Management? It’s a discipline that begins when one identifies a document that has value to an organization to support legal or business operations.
If you don’t have a records program, the first step is to find and protect information that is important and throw out the rest.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  However, most people tend to keep EVERYTHING, thinking that it all must have some value. When you keep everything, it’s very difficult to find the really important stuff that’s often buried under a pile of not so important stuff.

We have worked on projects that started with a room full of disorganized paper or group of servers full of unorganized documents.  It was a lot easier to proceed after more than half of the documents were discarded because they had little value.

The International Organization for Standards (ISO 15489: 2001) defines record management “The field of management responsible for the efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposition of records, including the processes for capturing and maintaining evidence of and information about business activities and transactions in the form of records”

Check out Wikipedia or the professional associations ARMA and AIIM for more in depth discussions about records.

If you want to learn more about records sign up for the EZine.

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