What is ERMS?
ERM disciplines need to be adopted by organisations to conform to legislative requirements dictated by regulatory bodies but also to address the public requirements to conform to record keeping of personnel files to meet the Data Protection Act. Freedom of information legislation has to provide citizens with access to public information and customers' purchasing rights. Underlying all of this are the huge competitive advantages and efficiencies obtained from electronic processing and its rapid wide-scale adoption by both government and commercial organisations.
The management of electronic records is complex, requiring a large range of functionality. Clearly, a system to meet these needs - an ERMS - requires specialised software. This software may consist of a specialist package, a number of integrated packages, custom-designed software or some combination of each. In most cases there will also be a need for a hybrid system to manage and control manual procedures and management policies. 
ERMS requires that there is a predefined File or Record Plan whereby records are classified or grouped. Capture or registration encapsulates a predefined set of metadata (indexing) that supports accurate representation of the record, disciplined disposition and retention actions. E-mail and Web pages need to be frozen as a record and classified. There is a need to look at long-term archiving and storing electronic records in a format that will allow retrieval and cross departmental interchange in the future. eXtensible mark-up language (XML) could have an important place to play in meeting this requirement as well as other international industry standard formats such as PDF and JPEG2000. Most EDMS systems contain many of these functions but often implemented in a 'looser' framework. EDMS' emphasis is on 'usability' and is designed around supporting the business function, with less emphasis on document controls and accountability. Many fundamental demands of ERMS will be needed such as access and version control, audit trails, security and back-up, but the raison d'etre for an organisation to implement EDMS is fundamentally to improve business efficiency and service, and authentication levels and preservation may be of lesser interest to the project goals.
 

ERMS Providers
The ICT industry is now incorporating records management disciplines within their product offerings. The approach taken by them is either to develop modules for their product or integrate a third-party ERMS system. Most leading suppliers of document management systems now have records management functionality added to their product suites. ERMS is a more mature market in Canada, USA and Australia with a number of well established ERMS products that also incorporate EDMS and workflow components. Providers of these products such as Objective Corporation and Tower Software have successfully entered the European Market over the past two years. 
Most of the established ERMS Products were developed from a product providing a registry system for paper files. Adapting these systems to electronic records and addressing some of the functionality required by EDRMS such as e-mail management, electronic signatures, automation of metadata/classification have proven to be limited and an imposition on the user. There are second generation ERMS systems now emerging that have improved the handling of e-mail, authentication of signatures and automated metadata capture and, most significantly, have reduced the overheads of ERMS adoption for the user. At the same time they have improved the accessibility and business value of the captured records.

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