Electronic Records Management Program

Nowadays, there’s an extensive growth of companies and/ or organization adopting electronic records management to make records more accurate, complete and accessible. They keep their records in electronic format in hardware or software. Those records include business activities, functions, e-mail or information related to the substantive business of office or work unit; transaction; formulation, execution and interpretation or change of policy; actions taken in response to an inquiry.

The companies or organization need to manage the electronic records in order to ensure the authenticity, reliability, integrity, usability and accessibility of records efficiently and effectively. There are many new challenges for managing electronic records including how to carry out the Records Management Program successfully by adopting new regulation, policies and procedures; controlling of data maintenance and migration; selection of storage media as well as proper access and security; budget control and control of records destruction.

The first step need to concern is to integrate the e - records into overall Records Management Program. Staffs may not know how to manage the e- records properly. In order to ensure the records are managed properly, company should establish policies and procedures of handling records for the staffs to follow and it is important to get IT department’s assistant and management support for new policies, and one more important thing is to make sure all staffs are informed and understand the policies. The e-records management may require staffs with related skills. So the company should provide staff training to make sure the records are handled properly by the records manage persons.

For data maintenance and migration, company should keep hardware, software and documentation for life of record and ensure they are able to be retrieved. And it is needed to migrate records to new technology for life of records. For example, as many e-mail systems have limited storage space that cause operational problems when messages are stored in the system beyond a specific period, records management staff or department must be in place to transfer the records from e-mail system to another records-keeping system to meet the required retention schedule. The system should allow deletion of message once their retention periods expire.

Records stored with new technology may be unable to read or write by the outdated software or system used before, so it is necessary to provide backward compatibility. When developing the migration plan, the records manage staffs have to get IT professional’s help to move or convert data before system is obsolete to avoid any loss or damage to the records and confirm all records were successfully transferred to the new system. This process usually make large amount of expenditure, it is important to control the expenses include in budget which