Opinion - Records management is resting on shaky ground. David Tebbutt exposes a faultline that results in responsibility for records and document management being batted back and forth between departments.(information management)

At a recent Butler Group conference on document and records management, research analyst Richard Edwards claimed that more than 70% of records management professionals believe that IT is responsible for management of corporate documents and records. He coupled it with a further claim that over 60% of the same people claim that IS/IT don't understand the organisation's document lifecycle.

If true, this suggests a faultline at the centre of organisations. How can you make a department responsible for something that it is largely clueless about?

The source of the statistics was the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), which received more than 2,200 survey responses from records management professionals, mainly in the US.

The two relevant questions from the survey are: "Who has primary responsibility for the day-to-day management of electronic records in your organisation?" and "Do you believe that IS/IT at your organisation understands the concept of life cycle regarding the management of electronic records?"

The insertion of "day-to-day" in question one, and the leading nature of question two, pretty much guaranteed the headline-grabbing results. Yet the survey raised serious issues regarding records management. Who is in charge? Who is responsible? And the answer, all too often, is "no-one in particular".

IS/IT exists to advise on industry developments and to provide technical support for an organisation's policies. In an area as important as records management, it cannot possibly lay down the strategy and choose the solutions. It's all too easy, and quite wrong, to have document and records management strategies determined by the soothsayers of the software industry.

Records managers can't determine the company's policy, although they can have a hand in ...