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Any information of value to your organization
is a record. Snowy Mountain Consulting Ltd. specializes in designing and implementing
cost effective strategies for managing information recorded both on paper and electronic
mediums. The following is a simple explanation of Records Management.
 Vital Records
Records
Record Lifecycles
Media
Vital Records
A vital record is information that defines legal, social, and financial status.
Vital records are records considered of such extreme importance, that their loss
would make the ongoing existence or operations of an organization impossible. Information
deemed vital is preserved indefinitely. As a result of being kept forever, vital
records are often transitioned from one media type to another as improvements in
storage technology are invented.
Examples of Vital Records within Industrial
Societies
- Incorporation Papers
- Legal Charters
- Corporate Shares and Ownership Documents
- Deeds, Leases, and Land Title Documents
- Accounts Receivables and Payables, Loans
- Contracts, Personal Records
-
Maps, Engineering Drawings, Patent Applications,
Copyrights
- Retention and Disposition Schedules
- Lists of Vital Records
Examples of Vital Records within Aboriginal
Societies
-
Traditions passed on from elders to
children
-
Drawings and ancient scripts on caves
walls and trees
- Ceremonial costumes and dances
- Language
Increasingly courts are recognizing the legitimacy of such aboriginal vital records
and significant efforts are being made to preserve them with great impact on land
claim negotiations.
Records
A record is information used in ongoing operations of an organizations. Records
are documentation of any kind that contains knowledge of historical events.
Examples of Records
- Sales Receipts, Purchase Orders, Contracts
- Regulatory Filings
-
Emergency Planning and Disaster Recovery
Guides
-
Communications in the forms of Letters,
Memos, Faxes, E-Mails, Web Pages, Database Elements that record a decision, state
a fact or request an action
- ISO Manuals and Work Procedures
- Safety and Operational Standards
Record Lifecycles
Records have a four-stage lifecycle. The four-stage lifecycle is generally recognized
as being Creation, Active Use, Inactive Use, and optionally
Destruction.
Records are typically organized into collections called records series by clustering
similar information together. Business processes called retention and disposition
schedules control record series lifecycles. Retention and disposition schedules
define the criteria that must be satisfied for a record to move from one stage to
another.
All organizations are unique in their requirements of managing records and no one
strategy is globally applicable. Management strategies are influenced by federal,
provincial and local legislation, regulations and traditions. Style of organizational
management, aversion or alternately acceptance of risk, along with financial, technological,
human and storage resources are also major influences that shape retention and disposition
schedules.
Many organizations have multiple records series for identical information
based on the length of time the information is of operational value. Some information
while critical for a short period of time is summarized in end of period reports
such as end of day, end of week, monthly, quarterly and yearly reports. Information
also commonly flows from one group to another during industrial, decision and business
processes. Planning for and managing these diverse situations requires careful investigation
and analysis.
Media
A record in today's business environment is typically fixed on various media and
by multiple means. Some examples of media are Paper, Velum, Optical Laser Disks,
CDRom, DVD, Microfilm, Microfiche and Electronic. Electronic files are often also
further classified by the application that created them such a MicroStation, AutoCad,
MS Word, HTML or perhaps just E-Mail. It
is not uncommon
to have so-called
original documents in both paper and electronic form with copies spanning continents
if not the globe. The proliferation of e-mail has made it easier than ever to consult
with colleagues in far flung locals spreading versions of contract, proposals, memos
and letters to multiple computer servers and e-mail folders.
Many organizations believe that everyone keeping everything is the safest and most
inexpensive policy. In fact, this could not be further from the truth. When organizations
total up the real costs of operating and staffing computer centers, equipment capital
costs of computer servers, tape drives and offsite storage they find that this information
explosion is in fact quite expensive and negatively affects their financial bottom
line. Storage of identical electronic files rapidly becomes a policy of never deleting
anything because it might be important. Even small organizations who just
dump everything on a local computer hard fail to realize that out of sight - out
of mind is most certainly false economy.
Beyond the management and costs of operating
the computer systems and e-mail servers, who is to say who has the original copy
if there are no policies.
A simple well planned approach that ensures:
-
that any person originating an internal
communication keeps the original,
-
any person receiving an internal communication
keeps it as long as required to perform any requested action and optionally issue
a confirmation that the action was performed,
-
all external communications received
are only kept by the primary recipient and any others specifically requested to
take some action,
is usually quite effective if managed by
a multiple records series with suitable retention schedules.
Appropriate management of records within an organization yields tangible efficiencies
that can be measured. Snowy Mountain Consulting Ltd. has both the skills and resources
to help your organization reduce its paper and electronic information overload,
while streamlining and standardizing the routing and storage of all forms of information.
Contact
us
to find out more about
implementing appropriate records management systems within your organization.
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