Documents or Records?

The historically separate worlds of records and document management are merging at an ever increasing pace. The traditional records management system (RMS) evolved from managing paper records and files and quickly became an indispensable part of large organisations business practice. The more recent document management systems (DMS) came from a specific need to manage electronic documents.

With records management standards and practices now necessarily including electronic documents (AS4390, Evidence Act NSW, etc) the two disciplines are necessarily merging. This new paradigm acknowledges that documents can be considered records and gives a single face to the production and control of the corporate memory. Bankstown City Council understood this changing market and implemented DOCS Open and RecordMANAGER, covering its needs for managing corporate records (including paper, fax, email, word processing and so on).

The system provides incremental functionality for the users, allowing any person using the system to be a document consumer, document producer or full records manager depending on their skill sets and the design of internal classification processes.