Wednesday 4 April 2012

Future of Paper Records

Many organizations have successfully migrated to paperless recordkeeping for specific business processes and implemented the appropriate backup and migration strategies to ensure lifecycle access and integrity. This takes a significant amount of commitment, planning, and business process redesign. Nobody makes that sort of investment just for the sake of going paperless, so we will no doubt be dealing with paper records for some time to come.

However, I certainly wouldn't base a go-no go decision on ERM solely on fears of technology failure. Like any other records repository choice, you just have to make sure you mitigate the risks by implementing the right controls. If you failed to keep backups and your system crashes, it's the same as storing your paper records in a low-lying area prone to flooding. If you can't open that 10-year-old word processing document because your current software doesn't recognize the format, you failed to implement a migration strategy. If the global technology infrastructure fails and wipes out everybody's systems, we'll all have much bigger problems to deal with.                   

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