Hi Ginny, 

I'm not as sanguine for a couple of reasons. In a previous life I worked for a software vendor with functionality that approached the coverage of ECM suites back then - but it did NOT include comprehensive RM capabilities. What made it worse IMHO is that it was often touted as a RM solution because records managers did in fact put stuff in it and manually delete it at the end of the retention period - therefore, it was being used to manage records. 

I certainly don't think that ECM and RM are mutually exclusive - my employer and a number of other organizations out there frequently use the term ECRM, or Enterprise Content and Records Management. However, I don't think they are mutually congruent either. I generally consider RM as a technology to be a subset of ECM as a technology. I further consider ECM as a strategy and RM as a strategy to have significant but not complete overlap - KM and BI for example are often found at direct odds with RM best practices because the value of trending data may extend substantially longer than the other legal, fiscal, and administrative values associated with individual records/series. And if you go very far down that path you end up, if not keeping everything forever, at least keeping lots of stuff for very long periods of time. 

There is in my mind a difference between managing content, much of which is draft, work product, or superfluous (think the hundreds of copies of an email or attachment) and managing the subset that rises to the level of records and it goes to the more formalized governance regime (processes and technologies) associated with the latter. I know there is a movement out there that suggests that since discovery doesn't care about the record status of a given piece of content, only its existence, availability, and applicability, we don't need RM. I'm not prepared to go there yet and I know you and the others on the list aren't either. But if we aren't prepared to go there then we need to be prepared to address the issue of why we don't simply manage content. 

Regards, 

Jesse Wilkins, CRM
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