In a digital age, records management is a challenge.

I found this interesting article (free registration required) on the New York Times discussing the ever growing problem that federal agencies in the US are having coping with the huge growth in digital information. The implication is that important documents are being lost for ever as they are not being appropriately saved in order to preserve them for the future.  Many agencies are admitting to having poor records management programmes with perhaps the biggest problem being that no one really understands what should be kept.

There is actually two main issues here. The first is that there it is difficult to figure out what to keep and what not to keep and then to communicate that to everyone in an organisation. The second is that when organisations moved to digital documents they seemed to lose a level of document control. The ease of digital information creation, capture and storage has overloaded the system and reduced governance. I have been in some clients where important documents from years ago are all neatly filed whereas newer documents of a similar type could not be found but where presumed to be somewhere on the shared file system.

In order to understand what information should or should not be kept as part of a records management programme requires an understanding of the role, context and life cycle of that information. Especially where a significant amount of technical data is involved companies need to find staff or consultants who have relevant domain knowledge to help companies design retention schedules that are consistent with that companies context and information life cycle and the information architecture that supports it?