How fitting it is that there’s been a quiet revolution in records management in recent years.
Often viewed as the preserve of librarians in buildings where hushed tones are the norm and silence is golden, this revolution has once and for all banished the image of the ‘inactive’ document condemned to a life in the dark, gathering nothing more than dust.
Records management and indeed, data management have gained greater prominence than ever before on the commercial and public sector agenda.
A raft of new legislation – a prime example being the Data Protection Act governing the individual’s right of access to information held about themselves – have served as a wake-up call to the complacent.
Incomplete record keeping or, indeed, well-preserved material rendered useless by inefficient retrieval processes does not just amount to poor practice, but could land organisations with costly and time-consuming legal ramifications.
A UK leader in the fast-growing field of off-site archiving and records management, TNT Business Solutions stores – and – scans millions of paper documents, audio-visual media and computer back-up tapes and employs more than 450 trained records management staff.
It numbers the Government, major hospitals, legal and financial sector companies among its client base.
Tim Robb, Divisional Director, TNT Business Solutions, said: “IT and records managers should provide secure, off-site facilities well away from potential common disaster zones to store computer back-up tapes. If a client’s data is lost or compromised, they will require back-ups to be dispatched swiftly to minimise time lost to the business.
“Records management is absolutely crucial to ensuring businesses run at their most efficient, and our customers see the benefits of a fully outsourced and managed system, hour-after-hour, day-after-day, year-after-year.”