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Comparison of New And Old Records Management [column]Apr 13, 2009 (East African Business Week/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- Johnson is the CEO of XYZ Supermarket with branches in member countries of the East African Community. He has one of the most modern mobile phone and a powerful laptop. Two weeks ago, on a Tuesday morning, I received a call on a landline number and on inquiring I found it was Johnson. I asked him what the fun was to call me on a landline and he broke the news that his mobile phone and laptop had been stolen from his car the previous evening. Johnson had been effective in saving all important contacts on his phone. Being a modern CEO, he also drafted and sometimes word processed some of the important corporate deliberations and plans himself. With high confidence in modern technology, Johnson hardly kept any business card on his table after saving the contacts on his phone. However, his Office administrator kept such cards in her cabin as just a matter of house-keeping. On his laptop, he had most high priority business transactions and strategies such as loan repayments, deliveries and orders, conferences and meetings and he could reschedule some of them and then inform the responsible staff as first thing the following working day. Unfortunately, with un-ending daily business targets and confidentiality of information on the laptop, Johnson never availed time to the office network administrator to back up his laptop. On the morning Johnson rang me, a new mobile phone was being procured for him and one of his subordinate staff had lent him a laptop. But the issue was how does he start off? In the meantime, his office administrator brought to him the business cards contacts she was storing in her cabinet. Johnson could not believe his eyes and got amazed with such insight and when he got the phone he politely surrendered it to her to save all the contacts on the phone. In business life, a lot of attention is put on the security of physical assets, but with disregard to corporate records as simple as even telephone contacts. It took few hours to replace the equipment stolen from Johnson, but most of the information on these tools could never be recovered. What could have been the best reward to his office administrator who felt that manual records could still be useful to ensured business continuity of his contacts? Do we have such plans in our daily and business life like having hard copies of all our phone contacts in case of any incidental problem on our phones? Secondly, to what extent do we protect important business information by ensuring that documents on computers have security like passwords? How often do we put up an effective system of backing up such important information even when special arrangement is needed? The author is a records management consultant. |