Records Management as the Basis of Open Information
| Date | 01 February 1991 |
| Pages | 34-39 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb060900 |
| Published date | 01 February 1991 |
| Author | Hata Hiroyuki |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Records Management as the Basis
of Open Information
Hata Hiroyuki
The Present State of Records Management
With the complication, intensification and specialization of administration, the
information drawn up and acquired by administrative organs for the per-
formance of their duties is steadily increasing and has reached immense
proportions, and the continued diversification and increase of administrative
information is inevitable in the future. In administrative affairs in our country,
systematization by means of computerization of activities based around large-
scale, repetitive work is fairly advanced, but fundamentally, that work is still
carried out with paper documents at its heart. It is an old survey, but in 1976,
the quantity of documents held by internal subdivisions of all provincial
governments was such that, converted to B5 size and piled up, the documents
would reach 380,000 metres, which is equivalent to 100 times the height of Mt
Fuji. Each employee would have as much as about 10 metres of documents.
Faced in this way with such great quantities of documents, what kind of
management can administrative organs apply? The following points can be
mentioned as being typical of office practice concerning document management
in our country.
The first is that in document management in our country, the main focus is
on smoothly performing one's own duties. In each provisional government,
document management is carried out on the basis of directives concerning
document management given such names as "document management regu-
lations," decided by the chiefs of each office. These directives in each of the
provincial governments have a basic common framework. They are all decided
on as criteria for internal departments or employees to carry out each step of the
office process, from drawing up documents to disposing of them, with the aim of
contributing to the rational and efficient execution of the relevant ad-
ministrative duties. Accordingly, each document is drawn up, then later kept in
a semi-currency or retirement in such a way as to help in its own purpose, and
those documents whose useful purpose is ended are discarded. Another aspect
of this creator orientation is that, except for documents drawn up with the aim
of being made public to the people, there are a fair number of times when the
content written in the document cannot be understood except by the persons
concerned, even though that administrative information is something which
could be useful to the public too. This means in effect that no management is in
force which distinguishes those documents to be made public and those which
are not.
Secondly, in our country principles of the decision-making process involve
Approval, ("Consensus-ism" e.g. circulating proposals to reach a consensus)
centred around the relevant department concerned with the work. The
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