Efficiency of Electronic Records Management Systems: Turkey and Example of Ministry of Development

Abstract

It is necessary to produce, file, index, use and archive records of an institution by evaluating, disposing or transferring them in order to enable the institution to fulfil its obligations regarding its administrative and operational processes. Records Management and Archiving applications are tools employed in recording and written communication processes. The public institutions, need information systems, which enable them to manage the records systematically, produce within their business processes and conduct such processes in electronic media. Legislation and standards are being set forth for regulating intra- and inter-institutional electronic communications such as official correspondence regulations of Turkey, institutional e-mail web services, e-correspondence package, etc. Besides, activities,which must be performed for the purpose of realizing business-yield enhancing properties of ERM systems, shall be evaluated in this paper. An electronic records management (ERM) application of an institution shall provide optimal benefit to the extent that it serves to enhance business efficiency, rather than monitoring inbound and outbound records traffic of that institution. For this purpose, a preliminary evaluation has been undertaken, regarding measurable benefits of an ERM application in the example of a public institution. We administered a questionnaire to the executive officials who use the system as well as those who are in charge of records for the purpose of revealing administrative level benefits of the ERM application, used by Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Development.