Developing an Organisational Information Policy to Mitigate the Risks Posed by Social Media Technologies

Abstract

Social media use by public and private organisations has implications for the usability, reliability, authenticity and evidentiary capacity of their records and poses technological, resource and policy challenges. It is essential to find ways to ensure social media technologies that are used in organisations and the policy frameworks that support their use are designed to mitigate the risks and address the recordkeeping challenges that organisational use of social media presents. This article argues there is a need for agile and responsive information policy that deals with the emergent recordkeeping challenges related to social media and suggests that elements from public policy models can be utilised in the development of organisational information policies that are well positioned to adapt to new information techitologies.