Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the records profession's approach to managing electronic records and question how much progression there has been, given most processes and systems are only slight variations on those originally designed for the paper-based world. It aims to offer a different approach, which focuses on automation and to employ some of the techniques used by well-known and highly successful organisations such as Amazon and Google. Design/methodology/approach - The paper represents the author's own views based on his experiences as a practitioner, his role as an advisor responsible for preparing and disseminating guidance material and tools to help support the development of records management within the education sector and interest in looking to the future and records management in the Web 2.0 world. Findings - The logic underpinning the functionality found in systems such as Google, eBay and Amazon offers a potential mechanism for establishing precisely how an organisation functions, how people work and how information flows. Going beyond classification and free-text search, functionality such as customer reviews, customer interests and statistics could be applied within the records management world. For example, instead of "customers who bought this item also bought" there might be "users who viewed/edited this information also viewed/edited these sources of information", to show exactly where a particular document fits into a particular process (or processes); exactly who uses it and to what information it relates. Practical implications - An automated approach is where the future of records management needs to head. It is a scalable approach which enables our professional to get to grips with the real challenges that the sheer volume of information that must be managed presents. Originality/value - The article provides a novel approach to managing records in the digital world by adopting methods used successfully by large well-known organisations in the web world.
