Electronic Document and Records Management
Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) refers to the process that governs the formal management of documents and records, through the information lifecycle. eDRM should be seen as a key element for all business processes, as it facilitates compliance with various regulations and corporate best practices; including King III and the ECT Act within South Africa and Sarbanes-Oxley internationally.
Legal Compliancy of Information Systems
Legal compliancy is becoming an increasingly important consideration for local and international businesses, with recent legislation prescribing corporate requirements relating to the storage and access of information and documents.
Locally, this translates into organisations needing to comply with a number of acts and corporate best practices. Among other stipulations, the ECT Act states that records must be available to all parties of a specific transaction, that records must be secure and integrity maintained and that access to these records should be controlled. In addition, and of even greater importance, is the fact that according to this act, electronic transactions and records are legally binding and carry the same weight in a court of law as paper based records. This means that all electronic documentation is now permissible as evidence in legal proceedings and creates an environment in which it is critical to ensure that such records are adequately and correctly managed.
Further, the onus lies on the organisation to comply with legislation and prove accountability in a court of law. It is thus vitally important to implement the processes and procedures defined and documented for the use of electronic records as evidence.
To this end, organisations need to select the technologies that will assist them in attaining this compliance.
In light of this, it is important to remember that legislation is technology agnostic or independent and it therefore does not matter which technology or device is selected, in terms of compliance. However, the technological platform does become a critical consideration when establishing whether solutions will be scalable and able to meet any future compliance and volume requirements.
Intervate has proven experience and leading skills in not only implementing required technology solutions for EDRM, but in analysing, understanding and interpreting business requirements in light of current legislation.
Intervate's eDRM Solution Offering
Intervate’s Enterprise Document and Records Management is a consulting Offering designed to help organisations realise their compliancy and governance goals to ensure responsibility, accountability, fairness, and transparency. This Intervate offering provides a proven set of deliverables and methodologies, as well as Intervate’s best practices from multiple successful customer engagements, to aid in the planning and deployment of records management and compliancy solutions.