How Information Is Managed And Accessed Is A Paramount Issue

By Dr Vijay Magon, Managing Director, OITUK Ltd.

Information is the lifeblood of all businesses, regardless of size or sector. The policy of how this information is managed and accessed should be a paramount issue to managers at all levels.

Most businesses will be dependent on both paper-based content as well as electronic content. The latter is surely a sign of more recent times, particularly with low-cost, high-speed desktop computing. Many businesses have fallen into a culture where information is stored in a veritable hotchpotch of formats, leading to an incoherent and illdefined approach to information management.

In order to turn this around, Electronic Document and Records Management Systems (EDRMS) offer the chance for businesses to evolve their practices and embrace a culture of effective and compliant information management practice.

OITUK believes that EDRMS is likely to become as ubiquitous and as pervasive a part of a company's enterprise application infrastructure in the coming few years as database management systems have been over the past two decades. Database management systems based on open standards enabled organisations to move away from proprietary, legacy systems and opened up options for inter-operability. Similarly, EDRMS will enable organisations to minimise dependencies and process inefficiencies due to "information silos,"