Information Governance vs. Records Management
> Date: March 3, 2016 at 9:49:50 PM EST
> 
> *Records Management* has been around since the 80’s and 90’s, the dawn of
> the tech boom.
> 
> Physical records were king and office after office flooded through with
> records that needed to be organized and controlled. Records Managers were
> then heralded in to create structure out of records chaos.
> 
> Now, 20-30 years into the future and records are taking on a new form.
> There have been heated debates and predictions in the hopes of going
> paperless, yet physical records are still here. However, physical records
> are no longer the top dog and physical record accumulation has decreased.

“Where’s the Beef?”   “Where is the Classification?”

While physical records are less in volume and electronic records has intruded into the Vital Records collection; the big problem I see is that a basic task of the records manager has somehow moved along without maintaining an accurate ability to “Classify” records.

The “Electronic Record” has muddied the waters.  If I print out a Lease or a Contract, then everyone knows how it should be treated. But if the same documents are stored in the machine readable format of electronic records, they do not have a methodology to deal with the same document.  Technology exists to identify these documents but no one has figured out how to move them to the equivalent of the vault?

Then comes the task in litigation of creating a “Data Map” followed closely by E-Discovery. Using a methodology that tags documents classified in a certain class such as Permanent or Vital or “applicable to a pending litigation” can be done; but the classification that was so key to records management seems to have faded a little bit. 

It seems to be done retroactively rather than proactively in many cases and that makes the litigation much more risky.

In Family Guy, they showed Moses coming down from the mountain top with three stone tablets of 5 commandments each; and said “God wants us to follow these 15 Commandments.”   And then he drops one tablet and immediately says  “God wants us to follow these 10 Commandments.”  It was better visually in the sketch.  But is Records Management dropping off some of the commandments as they store less and less physical records?

I believe there is more support for records managers to be involved in managing electronic records than they think.  

Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
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