Knowledge Management: Document & Records Management

Dr. Vikas V. Gupta reports in an article entitled: Need of Document Management System (DMS) at:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/computers_and_internet/article_621.shtml

"Estimates have been made calculating that a significantly large proportion (some say, more than 70%) of the documents owned by an enterprise are in digital format and might never be seen in hardcopy.

According to Gartner’s Editor in Chief James Lundy: Records management will become a top 10 issue for many CIOs in the coming year."

Pete's Points

From around 1986, when XT PCs first started their proliferation on to the desktops, they started to replace the pencil and the fountain pen as well as throwing most typing pools out of business. Typing pools were the place where people knew how many paper copies needed to be made of corporate documentation and where these had to be filed.

In Australia, the current "rule" in organisations which do NOT have an electronic records management system is, 'Read it, print it, file it!" Unfortunately most people have no idea what the "file it!" part of this rule means. They have never been trained in filing and generally have no idea that a filing system exists or if they do then they have very little idea on how to use it.

The risk of internal fraud, security vulnerability, lack of privacy protection is enhanced by this oversight by senior managers. Since the problem has been in situ for nearly 20 years, cleaning up the mess that has been left behind and/or re-educating the work force, is too expensive in many organisations. Thus, a risk managament approach has been adopted.

I would like to wish all of the organisations in which this is happening good luck with avoiding an "ENRON" like disaster.

For all those organisations which have purchased EDM systems, I would like to suggest that they educate their staff on what to do with them and start to change the 'way we do business around here' to reflect a new and more useful approach to records management.