ISO15489 launch 2001: The International Standards Organisation Records Management Standard ISO15489.1 and its Guidelines, ISO TR 15489.2 were published in October 2001 after three years’ hard work by an international group of private and public sector recordkeepers. The task, in which Michael Steemson joined as a member of the Australian delegation to the creating ISO sub-committee TC46/SC11, was fraught with pressures that few of the authors envisaged when they started the job at their first working meeting in Athens in 1998.

The paper identifies a course of development for records and information management to the end of the second decade of the 21st Century. It sets out four crusades of endeavour for records and information managers, the development of internationally accepted codes of practice, standards, retention schedules and management software, in what is perceived as an inevitable revolution to harness and control the soaring paper and electronic record usage in society. It becomes an allegory, describing a records and information fictional (R.I.-fi?) but, it argues, attainable world where “Information Strategy” (IS) has achieved the status of directorship in commerce and the IS Director controls policy and actions on a multi-level business platform.