Building the Record Keeping System (RKS). Process Improvement Triggered by Management of Archival Documents

This paper results from a research project at Tilburg University in which organization, information and archival studies have been integrated. We argue that the archivistic concept of the record keeping system (RKS) can be used as an instrument for improving the performance of the document-flow in a business process, and, as a result, of the process. Archival documents contain information related to the result of an activity, to the circumstances of their creation and to organization and business processes. The elements of a RKS are context, quality, appraisal, warehousing and logistics. The translation of our conceptual model is the process-specific archival document-file, a meta-file that operates as an engine managing document management. The approach was tested in a case-study. It became clear that our approach leads to considerable improvements in the flow of documents and thus in the primary processes supported by these documents.