User:Tugas

Welcome to Tugas

Tugas is a knowledge sharing for readers who are interested in records management.

Background

Many organisations, especially private businesses, regard records management as ‘not too important’ activity. Records management is seen as filing, thus staff who look after the company's records usually company's receptionist or secretary who does not have sufficient knowledge of records management and its compliances. They do not have the idea that mishandling records has legal consequences. Many private businesses have no adequate standard procedure of information distribution. This practice is commonly found and this practice puts the business at a high risk of receiving complaints from customers and an increased risk of litigation.

The Australian Standard ISO 15489 and the State Record Act 2000 treat electronic records and paper-based records with no distinction. Thus, the principles of electronic records management are the same as those for paper-based records. Electronic records must be created, captured and maintained to ensure that they are integrated into the whole organisation's records that they can be retrieved easily in a timely fashion. Furthermore, the Electronic Transactions Act 1999 (National Archives of Australia, 2008) stated, "encourages online business by ensuring that electronic evidence of transactions is not invalidated because of its format". Thus, what is matters is that business transactions are recorded in a way that supports the business needs.

According to Gartner (2008), “The technology of records management has evolved from the preservation of paper documents, through to electronic documents, and on to a very broad range of content types including e-mail and instant messaging”.

Email is one form of electronic communication commonly used today. In everyday use, for individual, email management can be described as moving incoming emails from inbox to save folder, or to delete folder, or to the appropriate archive folder. In this individual activity, putting emails into a wrong folder would not cause a big problem. However, for an organisation, the result of a bad management of emails can be very disastrous. Finding one particular email on particular date from thousands of emails can be time consuming, even worse, if that particular email has been deleted by mistake. Thus, managing email effectively and efficiently can have a significant impact on the operation of an organisation as a whole. Managing emails may be problematic, especially identifying which emails need to be kept and by whom. How about email communication via personal email address. Should we disclose this to public? Organisation needs a guideline about what is considered organisation's email and what is considered private.

Objectives

1. Increase the awareness among users of the importance of managing email effectively and efficiently.

2. To form guidelines for treating email as business records.

3. To choose an effective and efficient software for managing email.