Alfresco 3 Records Management
Comply with regulations and secure your organization’s records with Alfresco Records Management.
- Successfully implement your records program using Alfresco Records Management, fully certified for DoD-5015.2 compliance
- The first and only book to focus exclusively on Alfresco Records Management
- Step-by-step instructions describe how to identify records, organize records, and manage records to comply with regulatory requirements
- Learn in detail about the software internals to get a jump-start on performing customizations
A preliminary investigation will also give us good information about the types of records we have and roughly how many records we’re talking about. We’ll also dig deeper into the area of Authority Documents and we’ll determine exactly what our obligations are as an organization in complying with them.
The data that we collect in the preliminary investigation will provide the basis for us to make a Business Case that we can present to the executives in the organization. It will outline the benefits and advantages of implementing a records system. We also will need to put in place and communicate organization-wide a formal policy that explains concisely the goals of the records program and what it means to the organization.
The information covered in this article is important and easily overlooked when starting a Records Management program. We will discuss:
- The Preliminary Investigation
- Authority Documents
- The Steering Committee and Roles in the Records Management Program
- Making the Business Case for Records Management
- Project Management
Best practices and standards
In this article, we will focus on discussing Records Management best practices. Best practices are the processes, methods, and activities that, when applied correctly, can achieve the most repeatable, effective, and efficient results. While an important function of standards is to ensure consistency and interoperability, standards also often provide a good source of information for how to achieve best practice.
Much of our discussion here draws heavily on the methodology described in the DIRKS and ISO-15489 standards that describe Records Management best practices. Before getting into a description of best practices though, let’s look and see how these two particular standards have come into being and how they relate to other Records Management standards, like the DoD 5015.2 standard.
Origins of Records Management
Somewhat surprisingly, standards have only existed in Records Management for about the past fifteen years. But that’s not to say that prior to today’s standards, there wasn’t a body of knowledge and written guidelines that existed as best practices for managing records.
Diplomatics
Actually, the concept of managing records can be traced back a long way. In the Middle Ages in Europe, important written documents from court transactions were recognized as records, and even then, there were issues around establishing authenticity of records to guard against forgery. From those early concerns around authenticity, the science of document analysis called diplomatics came into being in the late 1600s and became particularly important in Europe with the rise of government bureaucracies in the 1800s.
While diplomatics started out as something closer to forensic handwriting analysis than Records Management, it gradually established principles that are still important to Records Management today, such as reliability and authenticity. Diplomatics even emphasized the importance of aligning rules for managing records with business processes, and it treated all records the same, regardless of the media that they are stored on.
Records Management in the United States
Records Management is something that has come into being very slowly in the United States. In fact, Records Management in the United States is really a twentieth century development. It wasn’t even until 1930 that 90 percent of all births and deaths in the United States were recorded.
The United States National Archives was first established in 1934 to manage only the federal government historical records, but the National Archives quickly became involved in the management of all federal current records.
In 1941, a records administration program was created for federal agencies to transfer their historical records to the National Archives. In 1943, the Records Disposal Act authorized the first use of record disposition schedules. In 1946, all agencies in the executive branch of government were ordered as part of Executive Order 9784 to implement Records Management programs.
It wasn’t until 1949 with the publication of a pamphlet called Public Records Administration, written by an archivist at the National Archives, that the idea of Records Management was beginning to be seen as an activity that is separate and distinct from the long-term archival of records for preservation.
Prior to the 1950s in the United States, most businesses did not have a formalized program for records management. However, that slowly began to change as the federal government provided itself as an example for how records should be managed.
The 1950 Federal Records Act formalized Records Management in the United States. The Act included ideas about the creation, maintenance, and disposition of records. Perhaps somewhat similar to the dramatic growth in electronic documents that we are seeing today, the 1950s saw a huge increase in the number of paper records that needed to be managed. The growth in the volume of records and the requirements and the responsibilities imposed by the Federal Records Act led to the creation of regional records centers in the United States, and those centers slowly became models for records managers outside of government.
In 1955, the second Hoover Commission was tasked with developing recommendations for paperwork management and published a document entitled Guide to Record Retention Requirements in 1955. While not officially sanctioned as a standard, this document, in many ways, served the same purpose. The guide was popular and has been republished frequently since then and has served as an often-used reference by both government and non-government organizations. As late as 1994, a revised version of the guide was printed by the Office of the Federal Register.
That same year, in 1955, ARMA International, the international organization for records managers, was founded. ARMA continues through today to provide a forum for records and information managers, both inside and outside the government, to share information about best practices in the area of Records Management. From the 1950s, companies and non-government organizations were becoming more involved with record management policies, and the US federal government continued to drive much of the evolution of Records Management within the United States.
In 1976, the Federal Records Act was amended and sections were added that emphasized paperwork reduction and the importance of documenting the recordkeeping process. The concept of the record lifecycle was also described in the amendments to the Act.
In 1985, the National Archives was renamed as NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration, finally acknowledging in the name the role the agency plays in managing records as well as being involved in the long-term archival and preservation of documents.
However, it wasn’t until the 1990s that standards around Records Management began to take shape. In 1993, a government task force in the United States that included NARA, the US Army, and the US Air Force, began to devise processes for managing records that would include both the management of paper and electronic documents. The recommendations of that task force ultimately led to the DoD-5015.2 standard that was first released in 1997.
Australia’s AS-4390 and DIRKS
In parallel to what was happening in the United States, standards for Records Management were also advancing in Australia.
AS-4390
Standards Australia issued AS-4390 in 1996, a document that defined the scope of Records Management with recommendations for implementation in both public and private sectors in Australia. This was the first standard issued by any nation, but much of the language in the standard was very specific, making it usable really only within Australia.
AS-4390 approached the management of records as a “continuum model” and addressed the “whole extent of the records’ existence”.
DIRKS
In 2000, the National Archives of Australia published DIRKS (Design and Implementation of Recordkeeping System), a methodology for implementing AS-4390. The Australian National Archives developed, tested, and successfully implemented the approach, summarizing the methodology for managing records into an eight-step process.
The eight steps of the DIRKS methodology include:
- Organization assessment:
- Preliminary Investigation
- Analysis of business activity
- Identification of records requirements
- Assess areas for improvement:
- Assessment of the existing system
- Strategies for recordkeeping
- Design, implement, and review the changes:
- Design the recordkeeping system
- Implement the recordkeeping system
- Post-implementation review
An international Records Management standard
These two standards, AS-4390 and DIRKS, have had a tremendous influence not only within Australia, but also internationally. In 2001, ISO-15489 was published as an international standard for best practices for Records Management. Part one of the standard was based on AS-4390, and part two was based on the guidelines, as laid out in DIRKS. The same eight-step methodology of DIRKS is used in the part two guidelines of ISO-15489.
The DIRKS manual can be freely downloaded from the National Archives of Australia: http://www.naa.gov.au/recordsmanagement/publications/dirks-manual.aspx
The ISO-15489 document can be purchased from ISO: http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=31908 and http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=35845
ISO-15489 has been a success in terms of international acceptance. 148 countries are members of ISO, and many of the participating countries have embraced the use of ISO-15489. Some countries where ISO-15489 is actively applied include Australia, China, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, and Jamaica. Both ARMA International and AIIM now also promote the importance of the ISO-15489 standard.
Much of the appeal behind the ISO-15489 standard is the fact that it is fairly generic. Because it describes the recordkeeping process at a very high level, it avoids contentious details that may be specific to any particular Records Management implementation.
Consider, for example, the eight steps of the DIRKS process, as listed above, and replace the words “record” and “recordkeeping” with the name of some other type of enterprise software or project, like “ERP”. The steps and associated recommendations from DIRKS are equally applicable. In fact, we recognize clear parallels between the steps presented in the DIRKS methodology and methodologies used for Project Management. Later in this article, we will look at similarities between Records Management and Project Management methodologies like PMBOK and Agile.
Does ISO-15489 overlap with standards like DoD-5015.2 and MoReq?
ISO-15489 differs considerably in approach from other Records Management standards, like the DoD-5015.2 standard and the MoReq standard which developed in Europe. While ISO-15489 outlines basic principles of Records Management and describes best practices, these latter two standards are very prescriptive in terms of detailing the specifics for how to implement a Records Management system. They are essentially functional requirement documents for computer systems.
MoReq (Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records) was initiated by the DLM Forum and funded by the European Commission. MoReq was first published in 2001 as MoReq1 and was then extensively updated and republished as MoReq2 in 2008. In 2010, an effort was undertaken to update the specification with the new name MoReq2010. The MoReq2 standard has been translated into 12 languages and is referenced frequently when building Records Management systems in Europe today.
Other international standards for Records Management
A number of other standards exist internationally. In Australia, for example, the Public Record Office has published a standard known as the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) to address the problem of ensuring that electronic records can be preserved for long periods of time and still remain accessible and readable.
The preliminary investigation
Before we start getting our hands dirty with the sticky details of designing and implementing our records system, let’s first get a big-picture idea of how Records Management currently fits into our organization and then define our vision for the future of Records Management in our organization. To do that, let’s make a preliminary investigation of the records that our organization deals with. In the preliminary investigation, we’ll make a survey of the records in our organization to find out how they are currently being handled. The results of the survey will provide important input into building the Business Case for moving forward with building a new Records Management system for our organization.
With the results of the preliminary investigation, we will be able to create an information map or diagram of where records currently are within our organization and which groups of the organization those records are relevant to. With that information, we will be able to create a very high-level charter for the records program, provide data to be used when building the Business Case for Records Management, and then have sufficient information to be able to calculate a rough estimate of the cost and effort needed for the program scope.
Before executing on the preliminary investigation, a detailed plan of attack for the investigation should be made. While the primary goal of the investigation is to gather information, a secondary goal should be to do it in a way that minimizes any disruptions to staff members.
To perform the investigation, we will need assistance from the various business units in the organization. Before starting, a ‘heads up’ should be sent out to the managers of the different business units involved so that they will understand the nature of the investigation, when it will be carried out, and they’ll know roughly the amount of time that both they and their unit will need to make available to assist in the investigation. It would also be useful to hold a briefing meeting with staff members from business units, where we expect to find most of the records.
The records survey
Central to the preliminary investigation is the records survey, which is taken across the organization. A records survey attempts to identify the location and record types for both the electronic and non-electronic records used in the organization.
Physical surveys versus questionnaires
The records survey is usually either carried out as a physical one or as one managed remotely via questionnaires.
In a physical survey, members of the records management team visit each business unit, and working together with staff members from that unit, make a detailed inventory. During the survey, all physical storage locations, such as cabinets, closets, desks, and boxes are inspected. Staff members are asked where they store their files, which business applications they use, and which network drives they have access to.
The alternative to the physical survey is to send questionnaires to each of the business units and to ask them to complete the forms on their own. Inspections similar to that of the physical survey would be made, but the business unit is not supported by a records management team member.
Which of the two approaches we use will depend on the organization. Of course, a hybrid approach, where a combination of both physical surveys and questionnaires is used would work too.
Physical in-person surveys tend to provide more accurate and complete inventories, but they also are typically more expensive and time consuming to perform. Questionnaires, while cheaper, rely on each of the individual business units to complete the information on their own, which means that the reporting and investigation styles used by the different units might not be uniform. There is also the problem that some business units may not be sufficiently motivated to complete the questionnaires in a timely manner.
Preparing for the survey: Review existing documentation
Before we begin the survey, we should check to see if there already exists any background documentation that describes how records are currently being handled within the organization. Documentation has a habit of getting out of date quickly. Documentation can also be deceiving because sometimes it is written, but never implemented, or implemented in ways that deviate dramatically from the originally written description. So if we’re actually lucky enough to find any documentation, we’ll need to also validate how accurate that information really is.
These are some examples of documents which may already exist and which can provide clues about how some organizational records are being handled today:
- The organization’s disaster recovery plan
- Previous records surveys or studies
- The organization’s record management policy statement
- Internal and external audit reports that involve consideration of records
- Organizational reports like risk assessment and cost-benefit analyses
Other types of documents may also exist, which can be good indicators for where records, particularly paper records, might be getting stored. These include:
- Blueprints, maps, and building plans that show the location of furniture and equipment
- Contracts with storage companies or organizations that provide records or backup services
- Equipment and supply inventories that may indicate computer hardware
- Lists of databases, enterprise application software, and shared drives
It may take some footwork and digging to find out exactly where and how records in the organization are currently being stored. Physical records could be getting stored in numerous places throughout office and storage areas. Electronic records might be currently saved on shared drives, local desktops, or other document repositories.
The main actions of the records survey can be summarized by the LEAD acronym:
- Locate the places where records are being stored
- Examine the records and their contents
- Ask questions about the records to understand their significance
- Document the information about the records
