WHY WERE CORPORATE WIDE RECORDS SYSTEMS IN THE PAPER AGE SO MUCH MORE SUCCESSFUL

WHY WERE CORPORATE WIDE RECORDS SYSTEMS IN THE PAPER AGE SO MUCH MORE SUCCESSFUL THAN THOSE IN THE DIGITAL AGE?

Records managers are often accused of trying to replicate ‘a paper paradigm’ in the digital world. This is a little ironic. If we were able to implement corporate wide electronic records management systems that were half as good as the best records systems in the paper days then we would be very popular indeed.
Our predecessors in the records management profession 20 years ago tried to abstract the qualities of the best paper records management systems and express these qualities as a set of technology neutral criteria, in the hope and expectation that we would be able to design electronic records mangaement systems that also met those criteria, even if they met them in a completely different way.
The best statement of these technologically neutral criteria can be found in section 8.2.2. the ISO 15489 records management standard, (see my last post for a more detailed discussion of them)
The five characteristics are as follows. In order to be considered reliable a records system must:
* routinely and comprehensively capture all records arising from the activities that it covers
* act as the main source of reference for the activities it covers
* link records to the activities from which they arose
* protect records from amendment or deletion
* preserve access to records over time
These characteristics may at first sight seem utopian. No organisation I know of currently operates a corporate wide system that meets all these characteristics and covers all of their activities. And yet in at the time they were drawn up, in the early 1990s, they seemed anything but idealistic. Before the introduction of e-mail, any organisation that wished to could set up a record systems that met all five of these characteristics.
http://thinkingrecords.co.uk/2014/09/19/why-were-corporate-wide-records-...