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To put this into perspective, back in the days before low cost computing systems were available, some 90% of the information we dealt with was paper based. The explosion in the generation and use of electronic information, coupled with the equally rapid rise in use of mobile devices has reversed this, i.e. less than 10% of the information we deal with in our day-to-day business is paper based!

While the benefits of this information revolution continue to manifest themselves in business and, more recently in social changes, the other side of the coin only hits the headlines when data misuse stories make it to the law courts. The availability and access of information lays it open to misuse and abuse. Continued cases of data abuse have led to developments in legislation, guidelines and standards for storing, managing, and destroying documents, designed to protect the citizen and businesses. In short, compliance with legislation is no longer an optional extra and organisations are scrambling to make sense of Records Management (RM) within their operations to meet compliance requirements.

At a time when the amount of information and records being dealt with by businesses grows year by year, in the form of documents, emails and faxes, the need for businesses to embrace a strategic policy towards compliant records and information management grows ever more pressing. Compliance is not an issue that should be shied away from, but confronted head on, thus assuring a policy of good practice in adhering to legal compliance is in place.

EDM has been around for over three decades and is in widespread use across the public and private sectors. It contains all the facilities for capturing documents and for managing document repositories - documents drive the business processes and are essential for business operations. What is RM and where does it fit in?

A record is defined as "information created, received, and maintained as evidence and information by an organisation or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business."

Records Management encompasses all the primary aspects of electronic document management, but also requires additional information which governs management of the electronic record, the electronic file/folder, and the overall fileplan/classification scheme. An electronic record, however, may consist of more than one document or electronic object - for example, an email message with attached document, a dynamically interlinked text document and spreadsheet, an HTML page with multimedia content, etc. To ensure that the record is complete and properly understood, the interlinking between these elements needs to be retained in metadata and made available for use within the record-keeping system. At this level, all the objects which constitute the record can be captured, managed, retrieved, and disposed of together as a unit.

Standards governing the management of records have been around for many years and are updated or replaced with time. For example, TNA-2002 expired in 2005 and paved the way for the Europe-wide Moreq2 standard - this led to the recent publication of the Moreq2010 specification which aims to make practical records management more viable. The USA's DoD Directive 5015-2 gave rise to the DoD 5015-2 standard for RM. Other countries have their own standards.

To appreciate the differences between EDM and RM, it is useful to think of the document lifecycle - the period between document capture/creation and its destruction. This period contains two quite distinct but complementary phases:

- business process, based on a document received or generated
- retention and destruction process for corporate records

So, when does a business document become a corporate record? A document will typically start life in a business process - it can invoke business processes and play a key role until pre-defined criteria are met to mark the end of that process. A classic example is invoice approval: an invoice is received or captured to feed the approval process which may involve several users; the invoice represents a positive value to the business at this stage (regardless of how "value" is measured). Authorisation and payment mark the end of the approval process. Beyond this point, the invoice must be retained as a corporate record for a number of years - the value of the invoice to the business has dropped and in fact is negative because it no longer plays a role in the business process - and it costs to store the invoice. The end of the business process marks the start of the retention and destruction process which is concluded when the record is destroyed.

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