Over the last decade the government has been encouraging public sector bodies to keep electronic records of their transactions. This is because there is a gradual adoption of electronic document management in government which has diminished the need for paper archives.
Graham Robinson, Business Development Manager, Avanquest Solutions
- In 1999 The National Archives published a comprehensive specification that enabled electronic records management solutions to replicate the access controls and information security required for Records Management.
- Also due to various financial scandals (Enron and more) and now the Credit Crunch, this has brought the need for good record keeping to all the commercial activities.
- But this migration to more electronic working has shifted the responsibility of record keeping largely from the Records Manager to the individual members of staff.
- This situation is exacerbated by the massive volumes of electronic information generated today, emails for instance, and this will increase in the future.
How good are the records that are now being kept?
How well are they being classified?
What should be kept as a record and what can or should be deleted?
- In organisations with hundreds and sometimes thousands of staff members, involved every day in their respective work duties; consistent and reliable record declaration, if left to the individuals, will fail.
- Many electronic document and records management solutions rely on the user to declare and file the record correctly, and this is one extra duty to be performed.
- It gets overlooked.
- This situation seriously compromises the integrity and completeness of the Records Archive, which could negatively affect the organisation at sometime in the future.
- Records are generated as a result of an activity or transaction and are thus part of a process.
- For good records to be kept, record declaration and filing should be specific part of that process, and left to the system to declare and not the individual.
- This often means implementing business process analysis and automation, but this is no bad thing as we all have to deliver higher efficiency in these straitened times. This is what we do.
The challenge in the Public Sector is not to catch up with the private sector, it is to continue to transform itself to be better, more innovative. We must achieve measurable improved value for money. And that is going much further than the private sector, and investing to save, at a time of budget reductions is challanging.
What we do with our huge data and document warehouses is critical. How we are re-engineering our processess to take full advantage of the ICT platforms we have invested in will in time give a massive payback.
And we have to do this at a time of reducing income and reducing support from the taxpayer, although we are well used to those sort of change management initiatives, but this time its to change the whole infrstructure, because it cannot go on delivering what its developed to deliver ouver time. It needs to deliver what the customer wants it its structure to be..
So efficiencies and better using what are traditionally seen as the overheads of staff, office space and time are where records management can deliver huge savings. Better customer services and organisations fthat are fit for purpose.
Because its these areas that we can control, the rest is down to economic drivers that are squeezing our resouces today,. And tommorrow that will be worse.
So active work in the area of Document management and its children of work flow and business process engineering are the big focus today and tommorrow.
And the support of Avanquest and the industry it is a major player in ,is vital.
Its in all of our interests for the transformation of councils to suceed, we all pay council tax, we all use these services cradle to the grave. We are all shareholders!
At this point, as we all face the axe of cuts and restructures, I feel we could say ‘I told you so’.
But the point is now we all need to look ahead to organisations that are being ‘hollowed out’. Losing knowledge and resources without facing the paradigm shift to be better at processing.
And thats where the whole thrust in 2011/13 will be. To not only re-invent the wheel but to invent a whole new way of ‘wheel less’ service delivery, from merged and slimmed down public sector fragmented client functions and partner organisations.