By David Roe | Pub­lished Jan 25, 2010

With the grow­ing impor­tance of com­pli­ance and eDis­cov­ery issues for many com­pa­nies, it might be time to con­sider deploy­ing a records man­age­ment sys­tem. Chances are that your com­pany already uses some kind of doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem. The ques­tion is, will your doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem also sup­port records management?

At the core of this ques­tion is what is the dif­fer­ences between doc­u­ment man­age­ment and records man­age­ment. Let’s exam­ine six dif­fer­ences.
1. Doc­u­ments v Records
What are documents?

Doc­u­ments con­sist of infor­ma­tion or data that can be struc­tured or unstruc­tured and accessed by peo­ple in an orga­ni­za­tion.
What are records?

Records pro­vide evi­dence of the activ­i­ties of a given organization’s func­tion­ing and poli­cies. Records often have strict com­pli­ance require­ments regard­ing their reten­tion, access and destruc­tion, and gen­er­ally have to be kept unchanged. There are often very stiff penal­ties for not doing so.

By some esti­mates, and depend­ing on the com­pany, 90% or more of all doc­u­ments are records (mean­ing a por­tion of them are not!). Con­versely, all records are doc­u­ments.
2. DMS v RMS
Doc­u­ment Man­age­ment Soft­ware (DMS)

Doc­u­ment man­age­ment soft­ware was devel­oped to make it eas­ier for users with a shared pur­pose, usu­ally within an enter­prise, to access and man­age doc­u­ments. Another impor­tant abil­ity is that it also allows them col­lab­o­rate on those documents.

Com­mon access to the doc­u­ments is enabled by exis­tence of a library and/or a repos­i­tory within the sys­tem.
Records Man­age­ment Soft­ware (RMS)

RMS soft­ware is more con­cerned with iden­ti­fy­ing, stor­ing, main­tain­ing and man­ag­ing data that is used to describe events in an organization’s work cycle that are related to statu­tory, reg­u­la­tory, fis­cal or oper­a­tional activ­i­ties within the organization.

Unlike doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tems, record man­age­ment repos­i­to­ries are gen­er­ally focused on keep­ing only what is nec­es­sary for a spec­i­fied length of time.
3. Storage

One of the crit­i­cal dif­fer­ences between doc­u­ment and records man­age­ment relates to the rea­son and approach each takes to stor­ing doc­u­ments.
Doc­u­ment Man­age­ment And Storage

The prin­ci­pal rea­son for stor­ing the doc­u­ments in a doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem is so users who need to access the infor­ma­tion stored in those doc­u­ments can do so quickly and easily.

In gen­eral, these gen­er­al­ized elec­tronic doc­u­ment repos­i­to­ries pro­vide for the checking-in and out of doc­u­ments that can be revised and unlocked for future revi­sion, with ver­sion track­ing and his­to­ries.
Records Man­age­ment And Storage

Records man­age­ment requires that records be kept in their orig­i­nal for­mat in case they are needed for com­pli­ance or legal reasons.

Good records man­age­ment needs to place records in their proper con­text so that gen­er­ally they are kept in series, or in indexes deter­mined not by inter­nal, enterprise-dictated rules, but by exter­nal rules.

In fact, record keep­ing has become such an issue that in addi­tion to on-site records stor­age, many orga­ni­za­tions oper­ate an off-site records cen­ter too.
4. Auto­mated processes

While all com­pa­nies in the reg­u­la­tory or com­pli­ance zone have to spend a lot of time ensur­ing that their records and doc­u­ment man­age­ment do exactly what they’re sup­posed to do, many of the processes involved are now auto­mated.
Doc­u­ment Management

Auto­mated processes are one of the ele­ments that make doc­u­ment man­age­ment attrac­tive to com­pa­nies whether that means the mass cap­ture of doc­u­ments and place­ment of that infor­ma­tion in the repos­i­tory, or its place­ment in a records man­age­ment system.

In fact, auto­mated process are a core func­tion of these sys­tems con­trol­ling the document’s life cycle, secu­rity access con­trols and other key fea­tures like ver­sion con­trol and short-term storage.

These processes auto­mate work­flows so that the right actions are car­ried out on the right doc­u­ments by the right peo­ple at the right time.
Records Management

Records man­age­ment uses auto­mated processes to man­age records in a con­sis­tent man­ner no mat­ter what for­mat those records hap­pen to be in.

Elec­tronic record keep­ing sys­tems must be able to pre­serve not only the con­tent of those records, but also the con­text and struc­ture they came from and often for long period of times. The final records should be auditable in their orig­i­nal form long after they have been put in the records repos­i­tory.
5. Security

There is no get­ting away from the secu­rity and integrity of doc­u­ments in either sys­tem. The dif­fer­ence between the two, though, is that with doc­u­ment man­age­ment soft­ware secu­rity is desir­able, with records man­age­ment essen­tial.
Doc­u­ment Management

With doc­u­ment man­age­ment, secu­rity has to be placed in the con­text of doc­u­ment acces­si­bil­ity for users. Autho­rized users have to have quick access to infor­ma­tion with com­pre­hen­sive doc­u­ment man­age­ment secu­rity con­trol­ling access to the repository.

While all sys­tems will have means of track­ing who has been using a doc­u­ment, when it was checked it out and when they put it back in the repos­i­tory, and any changes that were made to the doc­u­ment — includ­ing new ver­sions — the secu­rity stan­dards are not nec­es­sar­ily as strin­gent as those required for keep­ing records.
Records Management

At the moment, the stan­dard to which records secu­rity and records secu­rity within records man­age­ment soft­ware is judged is the US Depart­ment of Defense 5015.2 regulations.

If a sys­tem is com­pli­ant with the DoD 5015.2 stan­dard or equiv­a­lent it sets the stan­dard for man­age­ment of records that will be even­tu­ally trans­ferred to the U.S. National Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion (NARA).

These include gov­ern­ment per­son­nel records, man­u­als, stan­dards, direc­tives and doc­u­ments that are sched­uled for declas­si­fi­ca­tion or redacted items. In Europe, MoReq 2 is the stan­dard applied across the entire EU as a stan­dard.
6. Dis­posal
Doc­u­ment Management

The dis­posal of doc­u­ments in a doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem occurs when the life cycle of the doc­u­ment has been com­plete and is no longer needed in the busi­ness process. While this can mean destruc­tion it can also means turn­ing them into records.

The deci­sion to turn a doc­u­ment into a record depends on the need of the com­pany and whether there are legal require­ments to hold onto the doc­u­ments.
Records Management

The destruc­tion of records is gen­er­ally reg­u­lated by law with strict pro­ce­dures so that the infor­ma­tion con­tained in them will not be dis­closed. Records man­age­ment soft­ware plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in this by imple­ment­ing reten­tion and destruc­tion sched­ules that are com­pli­ant with regulations.

How­ever, with pub­lic bod­ies, the records will not be phys­i­cally destroyed, but con­verted into a for­mat that is accept­able to U.S. National Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion (NARA), or National Archives of the coun­try you reside in.
Final Thoughts

Doc­u­ment man­age­ment soft­ware was cre­ated to make it eas­ier to use store, man­age and col­lab­o­rate on elec­tronic infor­ma­tion. Records man­age­ment soft­ware was designed to man­age the life cycle of records so that orga­ni­za­tions can eas­ily com­ply with reg­u­la­tions and sup­port the eDis­cov­ery process.

It’s very likely that you require both doc­u­ment and records man­age­ment capa­bil­i­ties within your orga­ni­za­tion. Depend­ing on your needs, a doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem may be able to sup­port most of your require­ments. Under­stand­ing the dif­fer­ence between doc­u­ment and records man­age­ment and the soft­ware that sup­ports each, should help you decide your next steps.