Objective:

Records management is critical and a vital key component for management managing corporate intellectual property. Rather than being seen, as in the past, as merely an obligatory burden for meeting business, legal and regulatory requirements.

1. Information management describes a range of activities aimed at the management of information as an active corporate resource. Information existing in an organization must be actively managed in order to be drawn on as a resource, needing consistency in requirements planning, co-ordination of information strategy, and coherence in policy implementation. Records form part of the corporate memory of an organization, consisting of information which has been validated and recorded, and represent a formal, structured information resource to be managed within a broader information strategy.

2. The records management system should aim to support a knowledge intensive use of records as information resources, in accordance with the business needs of the organization, whilst also maintaining the completeness, integrity and reliability of the record itself. Electronic records are able to unlock the knowledge previously distributed in paper files, and the disciplines and structures of records management are vital value-adding elements to this resource.

Definitions:

Document management software addresses a common organizational problem – the inability to retrieve and manage poorly structured electronic information in an efficient manner. Document management describes the ability to capture, describe and categorize, store and retrieve, share and reuse electronic documents regardless of specific format. This includes: details of paper files; word processor documents; e-mail (and attachments); spreadsheets; video, audio and multimedia documents. The software allows documents to be associated with indexes that describe the document file, such as type, author, recipient, and format; additionally, the software may track revisions made to documents and link versions together, as well as providing added security features.