Records managers in the global business environment: the role of the records manager has evolved over time along with the technologies used to collect, manage, and preserve records.

• Author: Marsh, Mike

The records manager's role has evolved from the Stone Age to the Digital Age, driven by changes in information technology, storage media, recordkeeping regulations, and the globalization of business practices.

Records have existed since the first human found a way to record an activity or event by scratching a symbol on a piece of stone or daubing ochre on cave walls. The first records managers may have been the owners, authors, or custodians of such ancient works as Sumerian clay tablets, the Rosetta stone, the pyramids' hieroglyphs papyrus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Domesday Book.

Estate treasurers, tax gatherers, accountants, and lawyers performed recordkeeping duties for early paper records, often on behalf of the state, the aristocracy, and religious communities. But the need for such services quickly spread to anyone who needed to retain proof of their transactions or assets. Paper making and the printing press fueled a burgeoning paper-based bureaucracy with an attending need for managing large-scale filing systems.

More recently, government's public accountability has driven the need to retain and manage records. The U.K.'s Public Records Act of 1958, for example, states: "Every person responsible for public records of any description shall make arrangements for the selection of records for permanent preservation, and for their safe keeping." In response, the departmental records officer (DRO) emerged, some of whom had responsibility for over-seeing records creation processes as well as retention.

Meanwhile, private-sector regulations throughout the world require all registered business entities to create and maintain records of their activities. Specialist functions such as finance, accounting, and purchasing tended to manage recordkeeping, but many entities centralized activities in an administration department, possibly under a records manager.

The advent of networked computers caused a virtual global records inundation. Duplicates in different media, stored in many locations, with multiple owners led to loss of control over versions and retention policies. Records' creators became their own recordkeepers, leading to an increase in non-compliance with business rules and complications for records managers.

Records Management in the Electronic Age

Of course, electronic records are not confined to computers and their output storage media--disks, tapes, CD, DVD, and USB storage devices. They also include sound recordings, digital photographs, videos, films, x-rays and other scanned images, voicemail recordings, mobile phone recordings, text and instant messaging, and information held on a wide range of powerful but portable devices. As the technologies have evolved, so too have the associated problems and business risks.

Records and information management (RIM) professionals have come to understand, probably better than any other business manager, the consequences that using these technologies has...