Making the Distinctions Between Information Management and Records
Management
This paper
was updated in
Making Some Important Distinctions
Information, Documents and Records
For relevant information policies to be established and
enterprise document management systems to be developed, policy makers and
developers must see the highly interconnected nature of information,
documents and records. This paper briefly explores some of those
distinctions. For some reason, managers are usually very interested in the
use of information in the workplace, but are disdainful of
records. (Though it is not the subject of this paper, it causes one
to wonder: what is it that happens to information when it moves from paper
form to electronic form that transforms it into something important?)
Information technology functions typically enjoy a relatively high place in
the support structure of most organizations -- even higher if the core
business of the organization is information. Records management typically
enjoys a very low organizational profile or status, low budget priority and
low ranking in terms of investment in human capital, even where information
is the core business.
Senior managers tend to think of records as papers that are
maintained by their secretaries or in some central registry and then sent
off to some distant place, never to be used again, to gather dust.
Increasingly, however, these records are being created in electronic form
and, if managed that way, have the potential to become part of the engine of
organizational change rather than remaining as part of the paperwork
problem. The first important point to be made here is that the storage or
presentation medium is not what decides whether something is a record or
not. The importance of the business process, in the broader scheme of
things, that creates recorded information is what determines whether a piece
of information is a record or not. If the business process (or sub-process)
is important to the mission of the organization, then the recorded
information produced from the process is a record, irrespective of whether
it is created or stored or later presented in paper, microform or digital
form. The relative importance of one kind of recorded information over
another dictates its retention period.
While all records constitute documentation of some kind or
another, and may be referred to generically as "documents", again
irrespective of storage or presentation medium, the reverse is not true.
Some documents do not qualify as records they are purely reference
documents. Oxford Analytica and the Dow-Jones are examples of economic
intelligence information sources that may be consulted in an organization
through a computer-based information system or through printed version on
paper. Of course if such documents or portions of them are imported into
another document that is a record, then the reference material becomes part
of that record, because it became part of something else that qualified as a
record.
Similarly, documents in preparation or at some early draft
stage are not normally regarded as records until such time as they are
communicated into the business unit or corporate (institutional) domain for
comment or action. As a practical matter in most organizations, the large
majority of documents are also records. Depending on the nature of the
organization, as much as 90% or more of all documents are also records. Just
as all records are documents but all documents are not records, all
"documents" constitute information -- though the reverse is not always true,
depending on how liberally we define the word document. Since the
terms 'document' and 'documentation' carry a connotation of permanence or
semi-permanence, information contained in information stores, such as those
found in dynamic data bases, is normally thought of as information but not
as documents, even in the broader usage of that term. While the information
in such stores is recorded, it is of often of such a volatile nature that it
may change states several times (and even back) between successive
incidences of information retrieval against the data base. One of the policy
issues facing modern organizations is: which, if any, of our data bases
should we regard as 'records' and how will such dynamic records be managed?
The answer, of course, depends on the nature of the organization, the
business process that the data base serves, the implied necessity of an
audit trail or not, and the practical aspects of how to record individual
changes to the data as part of a record audit trail.
Thus it can be seen that information systems may very well
also be document management systems. Document management systems are
virtually always also records management systems. Electronic document
management systems (EDMS) are also electronic records systems. Understanding
these relationships makes it easier to appreciate the various policy and
systems issues that the use of computers gives rise to and the dangers of
giving high levels of attention to computer-based information (including
records) systems while giving little or no attention to paper-based records
system, both of which may serve the same business operations of the
organization.
Records vs Electronic Records
There has been a great deal of debate and discussion in
recent years about the difference between records and electronic
records, and it is not the purpose of this paper to review that field of
literature. While there may be nuances that the high priests will debate
about such distinctions, for all practical purposes electronic records are
simply records that are captured and maintained in analog or, increasingly,
digital electronic forms of storage rather than in paper or microform
storage media. For the purposes of this paper, let us just say that the
technology or medium in which a document is created, stored, used or
presented is not what decides whether it is a record or not. What makes a
document a record is the fact that it constitutes itself, or is the residue
of, a business action or transaction. Whether and for how long such records
are kept by the organization is a separate matter that is normally decided
by an archivist or records manager in consultation with responsible
operational managers. Information technology does, of course, change the
archives and records management (ARM) landscape significantly in that more
things are recordworthy in today's electronic environment than were even a
few years ago. For example, what used to happen over the telephone that was
unrecorded is in many cases today happening over electronic mail or voice
mail, both of which are recorded. Technically, and often legally, this makes
most such business communications records when they are among people who
have the competence in or responsibility for specific business processes or
portions of them that are the subject of such communications. The choices of
whether to keep such records should be made on an informed basis and not
because of a mistaken belief that such documents are not records even when
they are. Thus, while technology does not ordinarily change the nature of
recordness, it substantially changes the manner in which records must
be managed and the skills that need to be brought to bear on the development
and implementation of information systems. It also opens up new and growing
complications in the integration of paper and electronic
records.
Information Management vs Records
Management
Senior line managers and information technology managers
often suffer from misconceptions about the relationship between
information management and records management which are
normally regarded as very different activities. This is due, in large part,
to historical accident, because of the fact that usually hard organizational
lines have been drawn that should not exist between the computer-based
operations and the paper records management operations of most
organizations. Information management and technology (IM&T)
professionals traditionally have been more interested in the medium than the
message. ARM practitioners have typically been more interested in the
message than the medium which traditionally was in paper form or possibly
microform. The two groups tend to use different words to speak to sometimes
very similar subjects. They each have an arcane vocabulary that is not well
understood outside of their own professions, including the higher levels of
management that govern their budgets and programs at the highest levels.
Yet, with different tools, both groups are performing information management
functions. Records management entails more rigorous forms of information
management than is normally required for other kinds of information, e.g. in
the areas of records appraisal and disposition management. Nonetheless, it
might be said that records management is information management in disguise
-- no doubt a more rigorous form of information management than IM&T
professionals are accustomed to, but information management nonetheless.
When we come to this understanding, many related issues also become clearer,
as do the options for dealing with these issues. For example, as noted
above, it becomes clear that if an organization is about to invest in an
electronic document management system, it is implicitly also investing in an
electronic records system, even if it is not used that way to begin with.
This being the case, it follows that the functional requirements for any
enterprise-wide EDMS must include archives and records management
functionality. This is something that few commercial EDMS product have,
although that is changing for the better as these relationships become
better understood by senior managers in a position to put pressure on
vendors to provide the necessary functionality in their systems.
Information Management vs Information Technology
Information Management
The term information management (IM) is often used
synonymously with the term information technology (IT). Yet it is
very important to distinguish between these terms, because most
organizations are very deficient in the former and much too focused on the
latter, leading to a situation in which technology interests rather than
management and operational information needs dominate management attention,
resource allocation and related decision making. Information
management is the means wherein the existence of needed information is
made known to managers, action officers and support staff. It fosters the
effective use of information for specific business purposes and information
conservation, sharing and recycling throughout an organization and between
organizations with mutually supportive aims. The practice of information
management in an enterprise, whether public or private sector, involves
understanding and analysis of the mission and objectives of the organization
(read also as business system) and the development of families of
information categories that are related to one another through their
inherent or organic connections with business aims and processes that, when
articulated in graphic form with explanatory text, may be used to describe
the organization's information architecture. Information architecture
shows what information is needed for, and is produced by, its key business
processes and how the sources of internal and external information relate to
one another in the context of this particular organization, which will
differ from how similar information is used in other organizations. It
facilitates the development of information directories (or maps).
Directories may be of people with needed expertise in fields where the
organization may or may not have good information sources in digital or
paper form. Directories may be of information stores managed by the
organization. They may also be in the form of tools for the effective
navigation, use and disposition management of an organization's information
assets. The most effective directories embrace all of these things.
Because of the manner in which business systems analysis
(BSA) is performed to develop an organization's information architecture, it
is referred to as a top-down approach -- one which first looks at an
organization's:
Information management is
important because it facilitates intellectual or logical control over
information assets, a sine qua non for effective management of
information toward strategic ends. Too often, the practice of archives and
records management has tended to take a bottom-up approach and has focused
on the physical control of information with woefully inadequate attention to
its intellectual control. This is partly because of the fact that up until
very recently, most recorded business information has been in the form of
paper documents. Now, digital information systems afford the opportunity to
manage information in much more powerful, efficient and effective ways in
digital form rather than on paper (even though ultimately it may be printed
on paper for reading). This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for
managers more generally, and more particularly managers and practitioners of
ARM to ensure that organizational records are dealt with not only in an
organizational context but as intrinsic parts of business processes that
often cross organizational boundaries and of ultimate organizational aims.
As will be seen below, a well balanced program of information and records
management is needed to operate an effective organization.
Information Technology
Information technology on the
other hand refers to the infrastructure (often aptly referred to with terms
taken from the transport sector -- the information super-highway, info-bahn,
info-strada, etc.) needed to move large quantities of digitized information
in an efficient and secure manner from one place or person to another.
Information technology makes it possible to do a much better job of
information management today than was possible even a few years ago, but it
is not to be confused with information management. This is not to trivialize
technology. On the contrary, just as an organization must develop an
information architecture to understand how it can most effectively organize
and use its information resources, it must also develop a technology
architecture specifically geared to serve the needs of the information
architecture. The higher the level of organization to be served, the more
generic the technology architecture must be. Thus, at a national or
international level, the technology must be such as to support the most
diverse needs in terms of kinds of information to be transported and common
protocols for access to the network. For example, access to the Internet
requires the use of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol,
better known simply as the "TCP/IP" standard, at the network layer of
the Internet technology architecture. It involves a family of lower level
transport layer protocols such as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for
transmitting electronic mail between computers and the File Transfer
Protocol (FTP) standard to facilitate the transfer of files from one
computer to another. As can be seen above, the information technology
architecture involves the selection of important information and information
technology standards. By having these standards at the superhighway level,
it is possible for computers manufactured by different vendors with
different hardware and operating systems software to be interconnected.
At lower levels, such as at the individual organizational
level, many more standards may be required in a technology architecture. For
example, for reasons of limited technical support staff and budget, an
organization may require a common operating system software (e.g., Microsoft
Windows™, PCDOS™, or UNIX™). In some developing countries where there are
few or no internal technical support and where commercial technical support
companies are very limited in their technical depth, it may even be
necessary to establish hardware standards. Even in highly developed
countries, especially where an organization purchases computers in large
quantities, a hardware standard may be established every 4-5 years based on
competitive bidding as a means of obtaining the most advantageous price
concessions and to minimize technical support costs. Nonetheless, hardware
standards should not be seen as substitutes for open systems standards such
as TCP/IP or even de facto standards such as the MSWindows™ operating
system, because over time the forces of competition, price changes and
technological obsolescence may require changes in hardware standards. If
software standards are not already in effect, the organization will face
enormous -- very possibly prohibitive -- costs in modifying legacy
information system applications to accommodate the new hardware. Open
systems standards also afford one of the few feasible means of ensuring
continued access to electronic archives over long periods of
time.
Information Management and Information Technology
Skills
Apart from the several above reasons for understanding the
distinctions between information management and information technology in
business terms, providing a proper balance between the two in the emphasis
and work program within an organization is a major skills issue. Different
skills and possibly even academic degrees underlie these essential and
closely connected but different areas of information science. A person with
an advanced degree in communications technology is likely to have highly
technical and technology-oriented skills. A person with a library science
degree is more likely to have highly information-oriented skills. A person
with a degree in information science should have received a balance between
information management and information technology knowledge and skills, but
even here it may vary from one country to another or even one academic
institution to another. Beyond academic preparation, certainly different
experience bases may thrust a person into years of work in only one of these
two fields. Irrespective of academic degree, it happens more often that the
technology field is the area of greatest actual experience. Thus,
organizations that are designated with a combined title such as the
"Information Technology Department" do not typically separate the two words
with an "and" or even a comma to more clearly distinguish between substance
and form, message and medium, cargo and highway. The absence of the term
Information Management is a clue, but its presence is not any guarantee that
skills and programs in IM exist within the organization. Some don't even
attempt to provide the image of a balanced IM/IT program or set of services.
Some are simply called the Computer Department, or Central Computer
Services, carrying even more of a hardware connotation and orientation than
would be the case with such names as Office Systems Department or
Information Technology Department where other aspects of technology might be
included. Irrespective of the name, the focus of these departments is
dominated by technology interests and skills. Whatever the level of the
organization under consideration, this occurs very much to the disadvantage
of the small enterprise, the large organization, the ministry, the
government and, of course, in the end to the country.
If this is a problem in the IM & IT parts of the organization, it is no less a problem in the ARM organizations. Archivists and records managers are among the oldest of the information management professions, though they may not see themselves that way. Many in these fields never obtained a technology background or, if they did, do not keep their technology skills up to date. They do not always understand the lingua franca of IM&T, to embrace both IM and IT, and therefore often do not take advantage of modern information engineering tools that information management specialists use to exercise logical control over large information sources. By not engaging their IM&T counterparts, ARM professionals help retain the (inappropriately) separate treatment of information management and records management functions. They also help perpetuate the growing and very risky disconnect between paper and electronic documents and records. There is little hope for bridging this growing gap in information and records management practice, short of either great insight on the part of IM&T and ARM managers or intervention at the highest executive levels to cause the engagement, integration and attention to corporate level interests in information both as a strategic asset and as a matter of record. And that is something a lot of people should care about.