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 59 selectie ii 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). 58 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).

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2018 | | pagina 31