Records Management Programmes -

***The views expressed in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer***

I recently had some thoughts as to why we "do" Records Management. I have been a practising Records Manager for some time now and I thought it would be useful to "go back to my roots" to validate my thoughts as to why we do Records Management and what key matters/steps should we consider. I should be grateful for your feedback on my two lists below - one being why we do Records Management and the other being what we gain/lessons learned from our programmes:- Why do we have Records Manement Programmes ?

3/ Minimise litigation risks and respond to regulatory/legal enquiries in a timely manner

4/ Because you have to! (some industry regulators require you to have an RM programme - pharma for example)

5/ It can limit your liability in terms of over retention of Records working against you

9/ Regular interaction required to maintain focus (records management champion network)

There appears to be some overlap, however, I think these instances are justified. I should be grateful for your feedback and, of course, suggestions for further "enhancing" the above!

Comments

Conformance testing?

Submitted by Nikolaus Maack April 17, 2012 - 1:35 PM

I would be interested in hearing more about "conformance testing". How would you go about doing that? Are there consequences if someone fails to conform?

All too often, a records program feels more like a set of suggested guidelines than rules that must be abided by.

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Enhancing the Above

Submitted by Doug Embleton April 18, 2012 - 5:51 AM

Clear thougths, on a subject you have clearly delivered on.
Like you practicing for over 10 years in this space I would to add.
Systems Relationship: Making sure that transactional data held in line of business application is relational in context to the records or documents being held by the organisation.

So often 60% of the overall data processed and the finished Record files are connected, for instance transactional data carried out in the line of business application, with decisions and instructions taken along the way have a bearing in context on what final documents and files are produced, and then finalised as a record.

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Records Management Programmes - Conformance Testing

Submitted by Roger Poole April 21, 2012 - 6:21 PM

Thanks for your comments. There are many ways in which to test conformance with your RM Policy/requirements. However, one collaborative approach, would be to build a testing programme where you test that the business can retrieve records for which they have responsibility. You can test the retrieval of both physical and electronic records. A relatively simplistic, but useful test, for physical records would be to contact parts of e business which have retrieved boxes from external storage and ask if they found the record they expected to find in the box. For electronic records you could ask the business or IT for a list of all records of a certain type created within a certain timeframe. You could then select some at random and ask for the to be retrieved and shown to you.

This is just a couple of ideas - the are many ways to test. The test results can be collated to see if anypattns emerge. If you have a number of fails then you should investigate the reasons and suggest any mediation if appropriate. In my view, you should seek to avoid blame as you need the business and IT to work with you.

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