LetchWood Business Management.           

     Records Management                 
 

Records management seems to have gone out of fashion recently; before computers took-over the workplace, there was a well-understood method for storing information. Every customer, client or supplier had their own folder and every member of staff knew that all the correspondence and notes should be filed in date order in this one file. That way, you could go to one place and find the whole history. Now we have computers to store records, we seem to have lost that discipline and a client's records are spread around different computers, network folders, email folders as well as paper folders and the inevitable yellow stickies around monitors.

Perhaps the problem started because most offices introduced computers gradually; one or two stand-alone PCs to start-with, then separate email accounts, then some more computers and finally some sort of networking system. By the time that networks were available and network storage was affordable, the damage had been done; we were all working with our own variations and the only offices that retained some sort of control were the ones that printed-out every bit of correspondence and filed in the old-fashioned way. This means that the computer, with its undoubted ability to file, store, index and retrieve documents has somehow made matters worse and records are now scattered throughout the office in such a way that you can only find them if you know where to look. Clearly it is time to step-back and look at how the computer can help manage the flood of information that pours into the office.

If you find that you are drowning in data, then please talk to us about ways of managing your documents and bringing some sense to the system.

Practical Business Support    

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Last modified: 08/31/11