A consultant from Call Concepts South Africa, Paul Mullon, has stated that electronic records keeping is essential for organisations and businesses to protect their information.

This, he said will help improve compliance and protect information and data for organisations.  He made the statement at the 37th Records Management Foundation for Africa (RMFA) Conference.

Records Management Foundation for Africa is an African-based organisation established to help build solutions for managing public sector records in developing countries.

 The 37th RMFA conference was on the theme ‘Developing and Managing E-records as a strategic resource.’

Speaking during an interview, Paul Mullon said electronic record-keeping improves operational efficiency, information guidance and reduces cost.

“It is definitely essential to improve business processes, compliance, the ability to manage privacy of information and data protection. If it is done properly, the cost comes down significantly and there is better citizen service, better internal service and better management of information”, he said.

IT technician at the Balm library of the University of Ghana, Moses Bediako added that keeping records electronically, safeguards information and aids in easy dissemination of data and information.

“We need to make sure our records are kept electronically safe, ready to share and easy to disseminate and easily to also be used as a management decision making tool.”

“It is important that as stakeholders and government institutions, we need to go through all these things and make sure we know how to keep our records safe, we know how to use this records effectively because e-resources through digitization are coming and we need to make sure our records are managed very well”, he said.

The conference focused on helping organizations and companies to increase operational efficiency and lower cost of transactions through electronic records keeping.