I regularly get agreement from other records management professionals when I say that starting a new management position in records management is quite different from starting a similar role in other areas of the organization.
Across all functions, the new person is to establish procedures and controls and to improve the operation and the performance of the function. Going forward, the work of the function is to be better than, perhaps, it was.
What is quite different with records management is that the new person is also responsible for the existing holdings which may have been built up over years and decades. These existing holdings may have no documentation associated with them, or have different levels of quality of documentation. Examining the existing documentation, you can come to realize that different departments, or areas, of the organization called the same records by different names. It can also be seen that the description of the records prepared by the same person may actual change over the years.
From this painful experience, records management professionals realize the value of consistent description of the records.
Users across all level of management have very little hesitancy in suggesting that records be retained for long periods of time. They don’t appreciate the work involved in being able to manage and retrieve the records for long periods of time.
The good news is that with both electronic and physical records, there are very powerful ERM solutions that can be used to manage records. However, along with the technology, controlled vocabularies over these periods of time are also very important.
A very important benefit of managing all records with the ERM computer solutions is the sharing of records and information across the organization. Records can be captured in San Diego, Chicago or New York and retrieved at all national, or international, locations of the organization. For this to be successful, users capturing records will need to use a structure and metadata (indexing terms) that others are familiar with, to find the information.
So while the ERM technology is very powerful, there is also the need for controlled vocabularies.
Organizations need to develop an enterprise-wide classification scheme to use with the technology. The classification scheme, once approved and put in place, is one type of controlled vocabulary.
In theory, there is the topic of developing a metadata model within an organization. This is set of metadata elements that will be used to describe the records across the whole organization. As I travel extensively to teach the ERM, ECM and EMM courses for AIIM, I am learning about large global and national companies that are doing just that - building metadata models.
There has been a lot of talk about how employees will not be willing to work in such a structured manner. This is a topic for another blog. However, the good news is that so much of the metadata elements can be obtained from the computer systems, themselves, and staff are doing so much of this same activity on their own. Most of us move emails into personal folders that we have set up. Users would do the very same thing but within an organization’s structure. Most of us already apply tags to our internet content. We will do the very same thing using the organization’s metadata model. The ERM solutions, with their drop down menus and selection, using radio buttons, will accommodate this practice. If we are successful at resisting the natural push back we will get from the users, they will come to appreciate the benefits of working within a structure, especially in being able to find their records quickly.
How is your organization establishing structure to manage its records across locations and over time?
What success have you experienced in getting employees to work in a structured manner?
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