Where Should the Records and Information Management Function Live in Your Organization? -

I am often asked where I think the Records and Information Management function should exist within a company's org chart. This question usually comes up in the context of a frustrated practitioner who is having a difficult time getting traction for their ECM program or from business users how are frustrated at being told by IT, RM or someone else that they need to manage their information in a certain way that may not be immediately intuitive to them, or does not support their business processes.

The first question to ask is whether it really matters. Shouldn't a first class Records and Information Management (IM) program succeed by virtue of its own momentum and the value it creates irrespective of what the boxes on the org chart say? In a perfect world that would be true, but unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world (if you need proof see my earlier post about the Calgary Flames missing the playoffs).

So where should the Records and Information Management function live? Not in IT, at least not in most cases.

Notwithstanding the fact that the "I" in "IT" stands for "Information", the mandate of most IT organizations is to keep servers running and to manage vendor relationships. I know that many, if not most IT professionals are truly dedicated to helping their customers manage their business more efficiently, but at the end of the day the great majority of IT organizations are not set up to accommodate the challenges of managing information well.

And these challenges are many. Perhaps the most important comes from the fact that Information Management implementations do not have a natural beginning, middle and end. Information Management is an ongoing process that evolves and changes over time to support changing business requirements and the needs of their user community. Information Management is not a project and it certainly is not a technology deployment.

IT groups on the other hand generally operate a project management office tasked with standing up servers, upgrading software and rolling out new technologies. Each of these tasks fit well with a traditional "waterfall" project management methodology that expects right and wrong answers along the way. Information Management on the other hand is more art than science. Yes, it is critical that IM projects are managed properly and that appropriate controls are in place to ensure the implementation stays on track, but the key aspects of IM projects are people and process rather than technology. Change management is critically important and, let's face it, most IT organizations are not adept at the people side of change.

That leaves the question of where the Records and IM function should live within your organization. In my experience there are three good answers depending on the makeup and business challenges of your organization.

In the end, when push comes to shove the core mandate of each part of your organization tends to prevail. In the case of IT, generally speaking their mandate is to keep the servers running and as a result the processes and political power tends to support this objective. Many IT groups can walk and chew gum at the same time but if they start to stumble they'll spit out the gum before they fall over. Placing IM in a part of your organization where it can fulfil its mandate is one of the first steps on the road to success.

Comments

Submitted by Douglas Schultz June 24, 2010 - 8:30 AM

Greg - Great post. I see this question quite a bit and also see a wide variety of places where the Records and Information Management function reports to in organizations. I think the answer depends a lot on the culture and history of the organization up to the point that this function is established. In too many organizations, management of Records and Information is split. Some organizations think records = paper, historical, archives and information = electronic and all others. Those organizations tend to put RM in HR or an administrative function. Organizations that tend to think of managing content throughout its entire lifecycle usually think of the two together.

In the last organization I was part of, RIM reported in IT to the Director of IM, as you pointed out in your example. The IM director was responsible for management of all information - structured, unstructured, semi-structured and had responsibility for ECM, Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse apps, processes and policies. I reported to him and was responsible for RIM. One of the first org changes we made was to move Records out from Legal and into IT. We wanted the organization to get the message that Records was past just paper and historical content. It extended to electronic content, too (we were in the process of extending the idea to structured data base content as well, but were acquired by another company in the process and didn't make much progress in this area). The move of Records to IT seemed to elevate the credibility of that function in the organization and also made sure they had a seat at the table for any information management activities. I think we had good success with RIM being in IT.

Great post on something that gets debated a lot.

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Submitted by Greg Clark June 24, 2010 - 6:13 PM

Hi Douglas,

Thanks for your comment. You make a good point that there can be some benefit to moving the RIM function into IT so you can be engaged in the IT planning conversation and bring some information management perspective to IT processes. This can only help. In many cases those processes are constrained by IT (consciously or unconsciously), hence my suggestion to separate RIM from IT in most cases.

I think RIM should be as close to the business as possible. If that can be achieved in an IT context that's fantastic, but often it cannot.

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Submitted by Cathy Beil July 06, 2010 - 4:20 PM

In my (short) experience (limited to government), RIM gets the most traction if housed in the Legal/Compliance area. In the agency I work in and others that I work with, the legal team has significant clout; we wouldn’t even have a records manager right now if it wasn’t for Legal pushing for the position for years. In my organization, when it comes down to IT, Legal, and Operations, management listens most closely to Legal, so that’s where I’m very happy to be :) Unfortunately, I seem to be one of the lucky ones, at least in my state. A number of other agency records managers are relegated to administrative services-type areas – essentially the mailroom, a vestige of the days of file rooms and file managers, I think – and consequently (IMO) have much less “pull” than if they were housed with Legal (or even IT).

I do think Douglas' example of working under a Director of IM sounds intriguing, but we don't have a Director of IM, only a CIO. In my organization IT is much as Greg describes it in his post: hardware, software, and service management, and it makes less sense for RIM to be there. The legal team and I work closely with IT, and I could see reporting to our CIO, if there was other reorganization with the idea that the “I” in the information office isn’t just hardware and software, but information.

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Submitted by Nasser AbuQamar August 04, 2010 - 6:54 AM

We are looking to establish central Records/ archiving Department for a Government organization.
Any recommendations for the Organization Structure & manpower, Operating Model, Process, policy and procedures

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