Information and Records Management – a strategic mechanism to organize data.

Information and records provide a media through which ideas, fact/fiction, experiences, and everything else that underlies the existence of an enterprise is shared, acted upon, and improved.

In a way, both can be summarily categorized as the conduit for progress, what allows organizations, business, and even governments to express, preserve and when the need arises, retrieve intrinsic ideas, facts and experiences that can then be purposed into willful actions.

The absence of information or lack of records in any enterprise shelves continuity, breaking the flow of ideas that historically forms the basis of progress and development.

Without an established mechanism to gather, store and transmit information, enterprises are forced to act in naivety, in the process predisposing themselves to otherwise avoidable pitfalls that manifest as social, economic or financial loses. Information and records management is the strategic system put in place to prevent these scenarios from ever playing out.

The business of managing information and records is an essential tenet of contemporary business best practices. It forms a core component of the organizational framework of most multinational agencies, sometimes acting as the rate-limiting factor for innovation and development. Understanding why it is so important starts first with understanding it entails.

Per the Association of Record Managers and Administrators information and records management is ‘the field of management responsible for establishing and implementing policies, systems, and procedures to capture, create, access, distribute, use, store, secure, retrieve, and ensure disposition of an organization’s records and information.’

Put simply information and records management enshrines everything that allows for the efficient capture, utilization, and disposal of information through the course of its life cycle.

Figure 1.1 Physical Record Process

Access to information and the ability to manipulate it efficiently provides a privileged and pristine perspective. This singular fact emphasizes why competence in information and records management is a critical requirement for any enterprise looking to both sustain competitive advantage and comply with legal and regulatory standards.

Keynotes

The concept of information in this context is extensive encompassing physical, electronic, and other iterations of the former. Among these various classes in which information can exist, there is no hierarchy or segregation, meaning that regardless of the form of storage and presentation, all information is treated equally.

Note also that while document management, (the derivative of information management prevalent in most organizations today) bears marked similarities to information management since it too bothers on the capture, storage, modification and sharing of data, it should not be confused with the latter.

In addition to capturing and manipulating data, the ideal information management protocol also seeks to make data storage efficient, data retrieval seamless and data disposal trace-less.

Document management merely centers on collecting and sharing information in an organizational setting.

So, in a way, you could say information and record management is a step up from traditional document management, and while it indeed takes this charge a step further, it’s also important to realize that both act on the same substrate – information and records (presented as documents in document management).

An excerpt fro:

Information and Records Management

Fundamentals to Document Governance