Recently I’ve been working with a small group of people who manage the records for a medium sized business. As soon as I arrived they made a point of telling me that in their newish building, they were located in an area with no view while their IT colleagues were on the other side of the building with views to open spaces and water. This is somewhat typical of attitudes towards Records and IT teams and happens in a lot of organisations.
Locating the records team in this way relegates the idea of records and filing to the days of fling clerks in basements when no-one but he filing clerks knew what information was in what file.
Today it is widely recognized that records are everyone’s business and everyone needs to take responsibility for filing the information they create.
However it is still seen as tedious and nobody really wants to ‘do filing’. They’d much rather someone else did it for them.
Not so easy in the electronic age when individuals can create many documents or spreadsheets or presentations on a daily basis. Everyone needs to know where and how to file their e-docs.
This is where a structure for filing documents is so important. When you go to save a document or spreadsheet or a photo even, you need to find a place for it so you can find it again. It’s also useful to file your document with other items on the same or similar topic.
A ‘Google’ type search on your documents will work if two conditions are present:
- you have allocated keywords from a standard list to each document so when you search using a particular keyword, you will find all the documents on that topic
- there are not too many items to be searched.
This approach is fine in a newish business when there are not many documents but falls over as more and more items are added to My Documents or a shared drive when it takes longer to search through them all or the search engine stops working because of the load.
Even in larger businesses where there might a person or group of people with responsibility for records and filing, their role is more to establish a process and system for you and everyone else to use to file items. They don’t ‘do filing’ except for the items they create themselves.
The other benefit of doing your own filing – electronic or paper – is that you will remember what categories you have used and you will know where to look for items when, at some later date, you go looking for a document that you know is there somewhere, or that you need in a hurry, or if you want to re-use some information you’ve already created.
Re-using existing document is a marvelous productivity booster – but that’s a story for another day.