When organisations want to buy an Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS), they often believe it will solve their records management problems. They find they have lots of paper. They have lots of electronic documents. They have shared drives that are full and disorganised.

Organsations habitually over-retain information, especially unstructured electronic information, for many reasons. However, many organisations simply have not addressed what to do with this data so fall back on relying on individual employees to decide what should be kept and for how long and what should be disposed of.