identification of the broad range of information-related requirements that
need to be addressed for an activity
definition of records required to perform, manage and evidence the business
activity
definition of metadata required to support, evidence and contextualise the
records over time
prioritisation of recordkeeping requirements based on assessment of business
activity risks and legal and community needs
development of recordkeeping-specific functional requirements for systems or
services
documentation of the interdependencies between systems concerning data,
access, security and functionality
initiation of partnerships with allied information and technology
professionals to implement strategies to mitigate information risks, or
liaison with business, project, audit, legal and other colleagues who impact or
are impacted by recordkeeping issues.
Proactive appraisal is necessary because a Jenkinson-like fatalism, passively waiting
to populate archives with the 'physical part of the facts which has happened to
survive'3 and believing that active intervention by recordkeepers will threaten the
impartiality of evidence, are not notions that are sustainable in the contemporary
digital business world. System and service design in 2016 is competitive and crowded
with diverse business, IT and information professionals. In the digital economy,
'data is the new oil'.4 The traditional retroactive and system-specific approaches of
recordkeepers - and the widespread notion that records are documents or digital
documents only - have discounted the contribution recordkeeping expertise can
make in the plethora of information management-related challenges and
opportunities in today's organisations. Proactive appraisal is necessary to remake
recordkeeping theory and practice, to engage with the new digital contexts and
forms of records, and to meet those challenges.
2. Challenges of contemporary business systems and services
In both the Australian public and private sectors, business and IT staff have
significant autonomy to select and deploy technology to assist with business
automation and efficiency. Anecdotal information suggests that multi-function,
medium size government organisations of 1000-2000 staff can have 200 to 300
systems or cloud services in concurrent operation. While many of these public and
private organisations also have a corporate electronic document and records
management or content management system (EDRMS or CMS), increasingly the
majority of business is performed and therefore documented within these alternate
systems and services. The corporate EDRMS therefore no longer stands as a
universal environment for organisational recordkeeping. This is unlikely to be
reversed because, from a cost and change-frequency perspective, an EDRMS cannot
easily be integrated with the profusion of corporate systems. Such integration is also
increasingly technically impossible, as cloud services are deployed that cannot share
information with internal systems, or as systems start to generate records in forms
that cannot be managed in EDRMS environments. The contemporary EDRMS,
while it is still a stable, long-term management environment, therefore manages
records for a decreasing number of business applications and for diminishing
volumes of the organisation's high value information.
The adoption of social media by both government and private enterprise as a core
business platform has further complicated the information environment,
particularly for the issues of management, ownership and control. Social media
has been seized upon as a tool for direct community engagement, hence its rapid
adoption by business and government. It is a platform that enables issues to be
immediately identified and addressed, enables negative or incorrect community
perceptions to be identified and potentially countered, enables engagement with
diverse community members who are not reached by traditional messages and
channels, and enables direct community participation in organisational and
community strategy and direction. The value of the information which passes
through social media channels is significant and is creating connections between
the organisation and the community, and within and between communities
themselves. Yet this information is beyond the reach of centralised structures typical
of an EDRMS and the formal communication architecture of most organisations,
even where it is influencing decision-making. How to capture this information and
record its influence for the purpose of accountability and business efficiency is a
challenge to current practice and is not just an issue for the recordkeepers.
Traditional appraisal, which assesses and selects records at the end of their active
business life does not have the capacity or awareness to deal with records in these
disparate environments. Indeed control, accessibility and ownership of records in
third party or cloud service environments will have long since expired by the time
traditional appraisal approaches are usually applied. Post-factum appraisal centred
on the content stored in EDRMS and based on manually-executed decisions, is no
longer an adequate response to organisational recordkeeping requirements in these
diverse and diffuse system contexts (if it ever was). Therefore it is expected that
proactive appraisal will necessarily become required practice.
To implement proactive appraisal, recordkeepers need to orient discussion away
from software (where does information need to be managed?) and onto principles
(how does this information need to be managed, now and through time?).
Recordkeepers have been slow to move away from specific solutions, such as EDRMS,
and to engage proactively with principles for improved digital information
management. Improving digital information management has become a critical
need for organisations, however. Evidence of this is the investment that many
organisations are making in data governance and management.
Data governance is a system of decision-making rights and accountabilities for
data-related processes. It outlines the rules for who can take what actions with what
data, when, under what circumstances, and using what methods.5 The validity,
currency, accuracy and consistency of specific data elements and values in systems
are the focus of data governance initiatives. The quality, accuracy and timeliness of
these values have the capacity to impact operational, tactical and strategic decision
making, as well as service delivery. Organisations therefore invest in data
governance because it is seen as impacting directly on the corporate bottom line.
The corollary, that data-driven decision making needs to be supported by strategic
and tactical recordkeeping, is not necessarily understood. Instead recordkeeping is
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3 H. Jenkinson, A Manual ofArchive Administration (London 1965) 18.
4 T. Sherratt, 'Stories for machines, data for humans', 10 April 2015, http://discontents.com.au/stories-for-
machines-data-for-humans/ (accessed 5 April 2016).
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kate cumming en anne picot appraisal in 2016: Australian perspectives on
digital drivers and directions
5 Derived from Wikipedia definition, 'Data Governance', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_governance
(accessed 25 July 2016).