Over the past twenty years, large public industries in France have seen their sectors of activity increasingly opened to outside competition, both on the European and global levels. The evolutions brought on by this competition have forced companies to re-evaluate the way they process and manage information. Archives and records management systems must create systems that take into accommodate the following changes in the nature of these companies: loss of monopoly, changes in legal status and accounting structures, creation of new units, and a re-definition of development and expansion strategies. In this context of perpetual evolution, archivists must evaluate the validity of their tools and methods.