ISO 15489: Important Records Management Principles

The ISO standard 15489 is one of the most talked about pieces of information in records management today. The ISO standard was published on the 13th of March 2002 (Standards Australia, 2002a) and since then it has been steadily accepted by the records management community (Joseph, 2012, p.59). The standard is basically a set of guidelines and procedures for engageing best records keeping practice. This standard can provide great advantages from its use by organisations and is set up to be able to provide backup for organisations wanting to cover themselves in relation to important records management principles, like metadata standards, classification schemes, retention and disposition schedules, security permissions and monitoring and auditing. There have been several successful cases of ISO 15489 being used as a tool to help execute records management systems or modify existing records management systems in organisations and on a country wide basis. But still there exists

This is the starting point from which all other policies are heralded. It is essential that this is made available to all members of staff and should be made part of the main backbone of the records management system. This statement will refer to a senior manager or team leader who will take command of the records management policies in the organisation(Standards Australia, 2002b). Also in the statement, other policies relating to records management and IM systems will be referred to(Standards Australia, 2002b). With this statement in place, all the other policies should start to work together in tandem and work functionally. Without an overall plan like a statement there is no direction for the organisation to follow and ultimately no real system for the records