September 10, 2013
Records management has for years been a thankless job. Relegated to basements, back offices, off-site storage warehouses, the windowless offices with low ceilings and dusty hot rooms. Braving rats, spiders, stinging paper cuts, heavy lifting, endless paper shuffling and all for what? To be scoffed at when you try to enforce a company record retention policy or ask if a document really needs to be kept!
So here we are, off the back burner and into the fire! Why is Records Management suddenly all the rage? Let me tell you why. Because now the CEO can be thrown in jail if you can’t produce the FY’04 financials for the IRS audit happening next week! Thanks to the Andersons and Enrons records managers no longer lurk in the shadows of boxes in long rows of even longer forgotten reports. Now, they even let us go to informational seminars!
Enjoy the sun on your face and remember to wear sunscreen. Your skin is probably pale from so many hours spent moving two year old accounting files out the drawers and into Banker’s Boxes. Why are they called Banker’s Boxes anyway? I found out why. Because in 1917 Harry Fellowes bought a corrugated paper box company from a man heading off to World War I. That man’s start-up business was making storage boxes to hold the bank records of businesses. Because
Harry saw the potential for an increasing need for document storage as a result of the newly enacted Federal Income Tax, we now are all familiar with the brand name for the most widely used document storage box in America if not the World.
So, records management has been around for quite a while, thanks mostly to the government and its interest in how we pay our taxes. Today, of course, RM has expanded well beyond the corrugated paper box and so have our responsibilities for managing our organization’s records. The day may still come when we are required to archive our very thoughts so that Orwell’s thought police may insure we are not even thinking of evading those taxes!
Author: Michael Dailey Co-owner, vice president and chief marketing officer of Recordsforce, Inc. Past management experience in business-to-business services, most notable within the telecommunications industry. Extensive first-hand management experience in account acquisition, client support and product marketing M.B.A. degree, Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester; B.S. degree, University of Rochester Can be contacted at 603-766-8000 or [email protected]
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