What is records management?

The discipline of identifying which documents serve as evidence of a business activity and managing them accordingly: assigning ownership, classifying them, applying retention and disposal rules, controlling who may see them, and keeping a history of what happened to each one. The international standard for it is ISO 15489.

What is the difference between records management and document management?

A document management system holds and versions files. Records management decides which of those files carry obligations and enforces them. The same invoice can be a document while it is being approved and a record for years afterwards, and the second state is the one with rules attached.

What is ROT, and why does it matter?

Redundant, obsolete and trivial content: duplicates, superseded versions, and material kept past any purpose it once served. It matters for three reasons. It is paid for every month in storage and migration, it slows every search a person or a system runs, and it is discoverable in a dispute exactly like the content you meant to keep.

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Records Management

Which documents are records, what has to be provable about them, and how retention stops being a decision somebody makes one file at a time.

What records management actually is

Records management is the practice of deciding which of your documents are evidence of something, and then holding those to a standard: known ownership, known retention, controlled access, and a history that shows what happened to them.

It is not filing, and it is not storage. Both of those are solved. What is rarely solved is being able to prove, later, that the document you are looking at is the one that governed the decision.

A document becomes a record when someone has to prove something

Most estates hold three kinds of material and treat them identically. There is work in progress, which changes daily and matters only until it stops changing. There are copies, which exist because sending a file was easier than linking to one. And there are records: the contract that governs a relationship, the invoice that supports a posting, the certificate that proves a machine was inspected, the personnel file behind an employment decision.

Only the third kind carries obligations, and in most organisations it is not marked as different from the other two (International Organization for Standardization, 2016).

The four questions

A records programme is finished when the estate can answer four questions without a project.

Who owns this record, in the sense of who decides what happens to it. What is it kept for, stated as a purpose rather than as a habit. How long it stays, as a rule the system applies rather than a judgement someone makes each time. And who may see it, scoped by role and by case rather than by who asked.

None of these are technology questions. All four have to be answered before a platform can enforce anything, which is why a system configured before them inherits whatever the folders were already doing.

Deletion is the hard part

Every organisation we work with is comfortable keeping and uncomfortable deleting, so the estate grows and the growth is described as a storage problem. It is not. Storage is cheap. What is expensive is that redundant, obsolete and trivial content is migrated with everything else, searched alongside everything else, and produced in a dispute alongside everything else.

Deleting is only defensible when the rule is written down and applied by a system rather than by a person under time pressure. That is what makes the retention rule the deliverable rather than the disposal.

Where this sits

Records management is the operating floor of information governance: governance decides the rules, records management is those rules applied to individual documents every day. Personal data adds a second set of obligations on top, which is data privacy

(European Union, 2016).

The first conversation is usually the inventory: what you hold, where, and which of it is a record rather than a copy. It is answerable in days and it is what every later decision rests on.

Book a conversation

Records management, asked plainly

What is records management?
The discipline of identifying which documents serve as evidence of a business activity and managing them accordingly: assigning ownership, classifying them, applying retention and disposal rules, controlling who may see them, and keeping a history of what happened to each one. The international standard for it is ISO 15489.
What is the difference between records management and document management?
A document management system holds and versions files. Records management decides which of those files carry obligations and enforces them. The same invoice can be a document while it is being approved and a record for years afterwards, and the second state is the one with rules attached.
What is ROT, and why does it matter?
Redundant, obsolete and trivial content: duplicates, superseded versions, and material kept past any purpose it once served. It matters for three reasons. It is paid for every month in storage and migration, it slows every search a person or a system runs, and it is discoverable in a dispute exactly like the content you meant to keep.