Recordkeeping’s hill to climb
Categorised under: Document & records management, Information management
I’ve just spent the last two days helping an Australian government agency develop their web CMS requirements. As one might expect, the topic of recordkeeping came up, and how it should relate the CMS and intranet. I also had a long conversation at the end of the first day with the records manager, who is in the early stage of purchasing the agency’s first recordkeeping system.
It struck me again how big a challenge recordkeepers have within organisations. To be successful and useful, staff must save all the relevant documents into the system.
If only 20% of documents are archived, the system is a failure. If 50% are saved, the system is a failure. (Who would look in an “authoritative archive” when 1 in 2 documents are likely to be missing?) If 80% are saved, the system gets a bare pass (that’s still 1 in 5 documents missing from the collection.)
This makes adoption imperative, and highlights how hard it is to demonstrate success in the early (and later!) stages of rolling out the recordkeeping system.
For me, this means I’d prefer to have 100% of just five types of documents, rather than 20% of everything. At least then I could say to staff “For these five things, look in the recordkeeping system because they’re all there. For everything else, we’re getting to that.” This is a very different approach to training every staff member, hoping for the best, and only getting 20% of what’s needed.
What do you think? Worth trying?
Tags: recordkeeping, records management
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
2 Comments:
I do agree, but the biggest problem in my experience is actually defining a ‘record’ as opposed to a ‘document’. A system may hold 100% of ‘documents’ in an organisation but most of these could be rubbish of no future use to anyone, not even the author. Figuring out what actually needs to be kept in the system, and providing clear guidance to staff of these boundaries, is something my organisation finds extremely challenging.
Some time back, I wrote an article suggesting that every staff member needed a single sheet of paper describing what they need to store, and what they don’t. This is pretty hard to do if even we don’t know should be kept! Thus the focus on getting 100% adoption for a handful of record types, and then working out from there. Rather than trying to cover everything from the outset, and not being able to define the difference between a document and record, let alone getting more than 20% adoption…