The most common content management challenges that organisations in South Africa are facing includes:
EVERYBODY IS DELETING!
Many local organisations encourage their staff to delete emails and other electronic records after a period. Such a practice neither right nor legal, deleting an email is like shredding a paper document it is destroying evidence.
ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE
It is becoming essential for organisation to retain electronic documents as evidence. In many of these cases, electronic evidence used in disciplinary hearings are actually without any evidentiary weight because it was retained, collected and presented in conflict with statutory provisions.
CLASSIFICATION AND IDENTIFICATION
Most South African businesses are still failing to correctly identify and classify electronic business records.
STORAGE SPACE
The costs and resources necessary to store and retain all corporate electronic records are a significant barrier to proper records governance in South Africa.
Some people are under the impression that all electronic record retention is governed only by the ETC, this is however not the case. South African organisations, also have to adhere to the following laws that stipulate information retention periods:
- Companies Act
- Income Tax Act
- Value Added Tax Act
- Customs and Excise Act
- Stamp Duties Act
- Prescription Act
- Insolvency Act
- Basic Conditions of Employment Act
- Labour Relations Act
- Promotion of Access to Information Act
- Electronic Communications and Transactions Act
- Manpower Training Act
- Unemployment Insurance Act
- Wages Act
- Occupational Health and Safety Act
- Stock Exchange Control Act
- Second Hand Goods Act etc.
The King II Report on Corporate Governance outlines corporate risks and how organisations have to identify, manage or mitigate these. The risks resulting from a failure or refusal to practice proper records management is significant. Consider the following:
- Criminal fines as high as R10-million and imprisonment
- Inability to prove or disprove facts during disciplinary hearings or litigation
- Inability to respond to public requests for information as provided for in the Promotion of Access to Information Act 2 of 2000
- Personal liability for directors and managers for damages or losses as provided for in section 424 of the Companies Act 1973
- Keeping records without any evidential weight
- Slow or impossible data recovery
- No or low business continuity
- No or low disaster recovery
- Keeping records that could have been deleted or destroyed
- Waste of storage space
- Keeping the wrong records for the wrong periods
- No version control
In 1997 Gartner found that:
- Knowledge workers spend about 8 hours a week (20% of their time ) on document-related tasks. This will increased to 40% by 2003.
- Document handling costs about 6% to 15% of a company’s revenue
- The average document is copied between 9 and 11 times.
- Documents cost $ 20 to file
- Retrieving misfiled documents costs $ 120
- 25% of misfiled documents are never found
- 80% to 95% of enterprise information is held in electronic or paper documents
- 85% of archived documents never leave the filing cabinet
RQTech’s ECM allows your organisation to move more decisively knowing you have control of all the content and business processes, integrated into your existing systems, that you need to make the right decisions for your business.
RQTech’s ECM solutions are designed to give your company a competitive edge whenever there is a decision to be made by managing all your content; allowing you to create, manage, and activate that content to make better decisions and achieve your business goals; and, most importantly, to bring control and consistency to business processes.
Each of our ECM capabilities emphasises a different aspect of the ECM framework. But, built on RQTech’s ECM, a standards-based, enterprise application compatible architecture, each solution is also expandable to include all ECM capabilities as required.
By continuously monitoring and assessing the organisation’s markets and their corresponding clients, processes can be integrated and managed to ensure the execution of the organisation’s strategy. Ensuring that all legislation and governing principles are adhered to, the alignment of processes will either be executed and/or supported by aligning the technology and people that will guarantee the realization of the organization’s strategic goals and targets, structured to serve their identified markets.
RQTech strength lies in aligning People, Processes, and Technology in such a manner that it is structured to execute an organization’s strategy and achieve the corresponding goals. The alignment of People ensures that all aspects of change management, skills transfer, and emotional acceptance are achieved during the execution of processes. The alignment of Processes ensures that the business processes support the strategic objectives of the business. Lastly, the alignment of Technology ensures that the technology supports the strategically aligned business processes. We believe that ultimate sustainable success can only be achieved by considering all three dimensions together. Rqtech uses some of the world-class Business Process methodologies, which are in line with some of the best-of-breed quality and improvement methodologies such as ‘Six Sigma’, ‘Lean Engineering’ and ‘Theory of Constraints’.