In recent years Colombia, especially the capital, has been heading for a profound transformation in terms of its management of records. This may be due to the adoption of the well known ISO family of standards over the past two decades or perhaps because what we understand and adopt when it comes to documents and files does not constitute a unique and accurate reality. In this article we describe the main results of research focused on document management processes from primary and secondary sources provided by the Archive office of Bogotá and its research team. The intention of the article is not to dogmatize, but rather to open up the prospect of a discussion that today is needed at national, regional and district levels