The Systec Group offers ISO 15489 standards consulting.

Our business consultants help clients meet obligations arising from recent data protection and freedom of information legislation by recommending best practice principles for the management of records and information.

Our team of ISO 15489 records management and business performance management consultants begin by constructing a full assessment of your records management processes, and making recommendations to help implement ISO 15489 records management solutions. Learn more about the business benefits of implementing a compliant ISO 15489 records management system.

ISO 15489 document standards consulting is available from The SYSTEC Group.

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Published by ISO (International Organization for Standardization), ISO 15489, Information and documentation - Records management, focuses on the business principles behind records management and how organizations can establish a framework to enable a comprehensive records management programs.

The standard was developed by ISO technical committee ISO/TC46, Information and documentation, Subcommittee 11, Archives/records management. According to Robert McLean, a member of the committee, "ISO 15489 standard clearly shows how an organization can systematically and effectively improve its record keeping - and do so in such a way that the business objectives are supported. Senior management will be able to identify tangible benefits such as reduced costs and better managed risks, thereby contributing to better corporate governance."

The standard will provide a common international language for people to record and file material, in any medium or format or in any combination of media. Regardless of the size of the enterprise, the type of organization, or the level of technology used, users will benefit from reviewing their record keeping activities against the standard's best practice.

"The new standard enables organizations to develop policies, strategies and programs which will ensure that information assets have the essential characteristics of accuracy, integrity and reliability," further noted Mr. McLean.

"It demonstrates why good records management practice is essential to create, capture and use information essential for the organization to fulfill its obligations and meet the expectations of its stakeholders. The new standard identifies the key issues involved in retaining the information and making it available in a useable and reliable way as well as how it may be selectively and securely disposed of at the appropriate time."

ISO 15489 is aimed at individuals responsible for setting policies, standards and guidelines for information management within organizations including records managers, archivists, special librarians, knowledge management professionals, database managers, business administrators and individuals within organizations who are responsible for the oversight of record keeping practices.

The full ISO 15489 is published in two documents (the Standard, and an accompanying Technical Guide), which can be purchased from national ISO bodies. They can also be downloaded as PDF files through the ISO web site:

Designing & Implementing a Recordkeeping System (DIRKS)

DIRKS goes into some detail on the 'how-to' of designing and implementing a records management system. It would be a useful 'handbook' for anyone embarking on the design or re-design of the their records management system.

The DIRKS methodology is an eight-step process which organizations can use to improve recordkeeping and information management practices, including the design and implementation of new recordkeeping systems. The methodology is compliant with, and expands on, the methodological framework of International Standard ISO 15489, Records Management.

Towards the end of 2003, the Americans and the Arabs were discussing and agreeing about something. It had either nothing or perhaps everything to do with their political differences. The subject was the international records management standard, ISO15489, the world’s guide to saving, caring for and using the information that every organization, business, urban authority or national government relies on to carry out its functions.

The two nations were not, actually, talking with each other about the Standard but towards the end of the year, they both declared its colossal importance.

In the U.S.A., after lengthy, some would say tortuous examination, the National Archives and Records Administration was nailing the ISO 15489 standard to its mast. In his Strategic Directions: Guidance and Regulations, John W. Carlin, the Archivist of the United States, boldly went where the American National Standards Institute was still unwilling to go and announced:

“We will base our approach to records management on the ISO Records Management Standard 15489.”

At the same time, a critical symposium was being prepared in the United Arab Emirates port of Dubai. It was, said the President of the Arab Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives, Dr Abdulla El Reyes, to “show our full commitment towards upgrading the level of expertise in the area of archiving, traditional and electronic in the Arab world”. The first concern of the symposium was:

“International standards (ISO 15489) attached to the organization of archives in governmental and private establishments.”

Little more than two years after its publication, the first global standard for records management, the International Standards Organization’s (ISO) 15,489th work of standard setting has swept the world.

Written in English, it has been translated into German, French, Dutch and, by Renmin University linguists in Beijing, into Mandarin Chinese making it one of the ISO’s most successful publication since the ISO 9000 series of quality codes in the 1990’s

The new standard was published in October 2001 in two parts:

ISO 15489-1:2001 Information and documentation -- Records management -- Part 1: General, of 20 pages, and

ISO/TR 15489-2:2001 Information and documentation -- Records management -- Part 2: Guidelines, of 40 pages.

The second part, the “Guidelines”, is commonly referred to as the “Technical Report”, the meaning of the “TR” in its catalogue number[1].

The Australian Way

ISO15489 was soon accepted as the Australian Records Management standard, called AS (for Australian Standard) ISO15489, replacing the nation’s original 1996 ground-breaking guide, AS4390, on which the international code was based. The National Archives of Australia (NAA) gave the standard “formal endorsement”, describing it as “a high-level statement of principles and policy”.

Then, the ISO work was issued as a British Standard, BSI ISO15489. The British Standards Institution (BSI) also prepared a three-part “public document” (PD) guide to the standard, PD 0025 Effective records management. The three parts are:

Part 1: A management guide to the value of BS ISO 14589-1;

Part 2: Practical implementation of BS ISO 15489-1;

Part 3: Measuring performance in records management programmes

The French national standards authority Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) published the Standard as NF ISO 15489 Information et documentation - "Records management". In Germany, the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) has called it DIN ISO15489. Information und Dokumentation – Schriftgutverwaltung, while in the Netherlands the first part only has been published as NEN-ISO 15489-1:2001 nl -- Informatie en documentatie; Informatie- en archiefmanagement; Deel 1: Algemeen by the Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut.

In North America, commentators have given the code a rousing reception. A Canadian consultant called it a ”milestone in records management history” and the ARMA (Association of Records Managers and Administrators) International’s Standards Committee adopted a project for the “implementation of ISO15489 in the United States” which the association has fiercely championed ever since.

But, until Archivist Carlin’s staunch support, North American national organisations have been slow to recognise it, despite the fact that Mr Carlin’s Deputy Archivist, Mr Lewis Bellardo, and the National Archives of Canada’s senior government information management project officer Ms Catherine Zongora were both members of the ISO sub-committee that created the Standard.

At the bottom of this apparent tardiness lies the North American zeal for self-sufficiency. Both countries have done or are planning the Standards work themselves, like the U.S. Defense Department’s Design Criteria Standards for Electronic Records Management Software Applications, DoD 5015.2, of 1997 and updated in mid-2002.

In Canada, a number of provincial legislatures, notably the western prairie province of Alberta, have absorbed ISO 15489 into their information management regulation and now, the Canadian National Archives Information Management Capacity Check tool and the Canadian General Standards Board’s standard CGSB 72.34 Electronic Records as Documentary Evidence, to be published this year, have the international Standard as their bases.

Canadian launch

The Standard was launched with colourful ceremony at the ARMA International conference in the Palais des Congrès de Montréal (the Montreal Convention Centre), Canada, before an impressive group of august world archives and records officials including Mr Bellardo, Ms Marilyn Osborne, the Director-General of the Government Records Branch at the National Archives of Canada, ARMA International President, Mr Terry Coan, and Mr David Moldrich, the ISO sub-committee’s Australian chairman.

British Keeper of Public Records, Mrs Sarah Tyacke, joined the ceremony in a live video link from a U.K. government recordkeeping conference in Stratford-on-Avon, England and welcomed the new standard. She praised it as providing a “strategic and holistic approach to the management of records that senior managers can understand”.

Within weeks, the English-language standard was available for delivery as hard copy or on-line as an Abode Acrobat .PDF file from the ISO webstore in Geneva and from Standards Australia’s Sydney headquarters. Other standards authorities followed with the English version and their translations.

Three years’ hard labour

The standard had taken three years’ hard work by an ISO sub-committee, designated ISO TC46/SC11[2], with members from a world wide community including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands Sweden, the United States, the Peoples’ Republic of China and other nations.

In addition to the founding AS4390 Australian Standard, a total 317 international documents were reviewed during the series of intense, three-day conferences held in Athens, Berlin, Paris, Melbourne and Stockholm. SC11 chairman David Moldrich told the launch audience the job could probably have been written in six months, but acceptance of the document by the world-wide community required “long discussion, much compromise, many journeys and many, many cups of coffee”.

Members of SC11, including archivists and recordkeepers most notably from Germany, France, Ireland, Sweden, Britain, Canada and the United States, got through a lot of work. I joined them at the sub-committee’s Paris meeting at the headquarters of the French standards institution, AFNOR, in the Paris suburb of La Defense, a not inappropriate location in the event. We argued quite a lot!

ISO15489 was based on the Australian Standard, certainly, but it was not an easy passage from Wagga Wagga to the World. At the Paris meeting, it was Australians versus the Rest as other national member bodies showed a determined antipathy for AS4390’s processes, the “Australian how-to’s” we called them.

Australian delegates, lead by Sydney consultant and world-known recordkeeping guru, Ms Barbara Reed, sat and gritted their teeth as other national group leaders complained: they didn’t necessarily disagree with the recommended procedures, but they didn’t do things like that in their countries and other nations shouldn’t be pinned down to doing it like this or that if they already had established national processes.

It was a memorable show of Australian restraint, though Barbara’s fierce doodling -- her conference doodles should be on exhibition at the Australian National Gallery -- reached new heights of furious complexity and colour. Chairman David Moldrich maintained his legendary cool.

My other new colleagues, Monash University’s soft-spoken Mr Frank Upward, from Melbourne, Standards Australia’s energetic committee secretary Mr Peter Treseder from Sydney and National Archives of Australia’s thoughtful Ms Jill Caldwell among them, all kept their heads. They harkened to their leader’s insistence that there be “no triumphalism” by the delegation.