The fundamental divide between US and Australian approaches to records management means that information Management solutions that come out of the US (i.e. Microsoft) cannot be taken seriously by Australian Government and regulated industries

Information falls into two categories: structured data (databases with specific functions) and unstructured data (everything else: Office documents, emails, network files, SharePoint content). While structured data largely manages itself, unstructured data requires deliberate organization.

In Australia, Electronic Document and Records Management Systems (EDRMS) solve this by structuring unstructured data through systematic container titling based on the AFDA Express V2 classification system, organizing information by Function-Activity-Descriptor.

The AFDA is issued by National Archives for Federal Government. State Governments and Territories create their own Retention and Disposal Schedules.

American information management fundamentally differs from Australian practices. We discovered this in the late 90s when I was working at TOWER Software, making and implementing TRIM (Content Manager – an EDRMS). Americans practice document management, not records management.

They would pass documents around, attach further documents to the original document if necessary, and when finished, put the documents in a box. Finding information was called the “paper-chase”, not “where is the File”. With the evolution to electronic document management, the concept remained the same and they workflow individual electronic information.

This cultural difference persists today. US companies have no concept of managing information at the collection level, creating what industry experts call "information chaos."

Microsoft SharePoint: A Recipe for Disaster

SharePoint exemplifies these problems through three mechanisms:

Folder Proliferation: The Windows Explorer paradigm creates confusing "rabbit holes" that only make sense to their creators, who may leave the organization over time.

Security Fragmentation: Each folder requires individual access permissions, violating corporate information governance and creating orphaned content when staff depart.

Uncontrolled Sprawl: Anyone can create new SharePoint or Teams sites with custom permissions, making central management impossible.

The real crisis emerges during information disposal. Microsoft's object-centric approach embeds metadata within documents - when content is deleted, all evidence of its existence disappears.

Australian government and regulated industries must retain metadata while removing content to prove proper disposal under retention schedules. This protects organizations during Freedom of Information requests and legal proceedings.

EDRMS systems handle this correctly through metadata-centric relational databases. Object-centric solutions like SharePoint make compliance impossible - once the object is gone, there's no proof it ever existed.

Privacy Act Complications

The Privacy Act's APP 11.2 requires destroying personal information once it's no longer needed for business purposes, unless it's a Commonwealth Record (which EDRMS content is). Organizations using SharePoint face an impossible choice: over-retain information indefinitely or risk compliance violations.

Tech giants now promote AI as the solution to information chaos. However, AI requires the very structure and context that proper records management provides - something US companies lack. The fundamental approach remains flawed.

The first thing that AI needs is structure and context – which is Records Management – which the US doesn’t have. AI needs Records Management, but Records Management does not need AI.

Purview, Microsoft’s compliance solution, actually violates records management principles by applying retention labels at document level without aggregation, then deleting information from folders at different times.

The Path Forward

Australian organizations should resist following US tech giants down this path. The rules governing information management haven't changed in decades: organize information by subject (Function-Activity-Descriptor) at the container (File/folder) level.

This simple principle, which big tech doesn't understand, forms the foundation of effective information management. There's no need for the world to abandon proven records management practices just because the US never adopted them.

Scott Brown is Information and Records Specialist at Safe Work Australia.