Investigating the awareness of records management practice at private organization / Nur Nadia Fatma Mat Ripah

Records Management has becomes the main aspects for any organizations either public or
private organizations in achieving their goals. As for the public organizations, the records
management aspects are properly practiced because it is part of the rules and regulations
required in handling the entire government business and activities. However, in the private
organizations, the aspects of records management practices is treated as low priority which
has led to the loss of many vital records. Generally, good records management practices can
be successfully implemented by using the proper references, methods, knowledge and skills.
Besides, implementing good records management practices can directly contributes to the
successful management of businesses activities conducted in the organizations. This is also
can facilitates the organizations in providing recorded information that act as evidence and
proof of any business transaction activities conducted by the organizations. Unfortunately,
records management practices have becomes unfamiliar term in most of private
organizations as they are being ignorant and unaware about the practice and its importance.
This has led to the issues of losing the trustworthiness of vital records as well as unable to
provide the trusted evidence on any business transaction activities conducted by the private
organization. Triggered by the issues, this study is formulated to investigate the awareness
of private organizations in term of their current activities of records management practiced.
On top of that, there are various literatures on the previous and related studies are reviewed
and synthesized. These include identifying several elements from the related models and
literatures that would contribute as part of the elements that can be used in investigating the
awareness on records management practices at private organization. By using the qualitative
approached, this study has conducted an interview and discussion session with the four (4)
respondents from a private organization. The respondents are selected based on their
experience and current job specification which directly involved in managing the records
produced by their organization. As discussed, the findings gathered shows the overall aspect
of records management practices are reflected through three (3) main elements namely
Awareness, Appraisal and Disposition. This followed by seventeen (17) sub-elements
verified by the private organization. The sub-elements under Awareness are Effect, Level,
Opinion, Challenges, Reference and Misplacement. As for Appraisal sub-elements, there are
Understanding, Schedule, Storage, Method and Outcome. Next, the sub-elements under
Disposition are Concept, Result, Access, Reason, Technique and Guidance. This is shown
that the existence of sub-elements contributes to the formulation of complete elements
required by the organization for the investigation purposes. Therefore, by merging the main
elements and sub-elements in a dedicated model, it has becomes the extensive findings
presented from this study. In fact, mapping those elements with the identified aspects of the
current practices and awareness, this study has contributes to the formulation of Records
Management Practice (RMP) model which is used as the main findings of this study. Hence,
the formulated model is expectedly adopted and applied by other researchers in
investigating the awareness of records management practice in their fields of study.