| Information management: dealing with your business records The dream of the paperless office is unrealistic for most businesses. Tony Croft overviews options for critical records management.
As a business grows, so does its mountain of paperwork necessitating the need for a more professional approach to the whole area of record management. Companies are faced with a plethora of options and the ultimate dilemma of how to keep their records. In what format? Hard copy, CD or electronic? How long should they be kept for? What should be destroyed? Is there a carefully defined retention and destruction policy, which meets the requirements of the company and complies with current legislation? Where to store hard copy, on-site or off-site? Do you scan the paperwork and having done that, do you destroy it? The decisions to be made should be part of the senior management process not made ad hoc by each department. To confuse matters even further, new companies are springing up all the time offering the ‘perfect solution’ to all your information systems! They will tell you that records management is dead because it is all about managing paper and paper is about to disappear. You will no longer need a retention management policy because space problems will be a thing of the past. Computer storage is cheap and optical technology means you can retain everything forever. Regretfully real business life is not like that. Paper has not disappeared and its use continues to grow exponentially. In the end, records management remains about discipline not pure technology. The necessity to introduce record systems best suited to your company’s needs and the nature of your business. The problem remains that the maintenance of records is not seen as an earnings related activity and is relegated to the bottom of the fiscal requirement pile. The truth of the matter is that every company has differing requirements when it comes to its record management. The need to retrieve your records is a vital consideration. The urgency of retrieving an anaesthetic record immediately prior to an operation is far greater than the retrieval of a financial transaction for insertion into a report. Companies need to sort out retrieval requirements, retention and destruction policies as a matter of course, and take steps to implement these policies either in partnership with a professional records company or formulate and practice an in-house policy. To scan or not to scan? Some documents genuinely lend themselves to imaging, others can be a nightmare. Companies rush off to purchase the latest scanner and find that they have forgotten that their files contain differing sizes and shapes, differing colours and weights of paper, staples galore and a miscellany of junk documents which could be destroyed. Scanning is efficient in the right circumstances, and if indexed correctly and carefully, documents can be easily and efficiently retrieved. You can do this in-house or send them to a scanning bureau; the cost once you have paid staff and purchased a suitable machine is very similar. The downside is that is an incredibly boring job but requires a skilled and intelligent operator to sort, scan and index correctly, the two are often incompatible. It is possible to keep one archive box at a commercial archive company for up to 25 years for the price of scanning the paper inside! If in doubt, consult a company that offers both services, scanning and archiving, in this way you will not have a biased opinion! Finally, only the largest of companies should be entertaining the idea of fully functional electronics data management. You cannot move from disorganised paperwork to an electronic system without a great deal of structural re-evaluation. If in doubt, obtain a copy of the new British Standards document BSI ISO 15489, this is essential reading. For most companies it is enough to ensure that the management of records is given as high a priority as other disciplines. Without easily accessed documentation, companies stand to lose not only time and money but leave themselves open to the increasing possibility of litigation for non-production of or loss of records. Improper retention of records or their incorrect destruction can cost your company dearly. Don’t take unnecessary risks with your business, for peace of mind get a professional records audit now, or consult a company who will give you advice free of charge. Author: Tony Croft of File & Data Storage, a member of the UK network of archiving organisations, National Archive Solutions. E-mail tc@londonweb.net
•Date:
12th September 2003 •Region: UK/Worldwide
•Type: Article •Topic:
BC general |
