Spotlight

Has your organisation recently undergone a change concerning the way it manages its records and information?

Have you introduced a new corporate file plan, outsourced your data storage to a commercial 3rd party host, undergone a major appraisal and disposal exercise, facilitated electronic workflow, used new web technologies to enable collaborative or flexible working, introduced an EDRMS or embarked on something similar?

How did you know if it was a success? Could the impact of your initiative be measured and were you able to calculate how much it all cost to achieve? If not, would you find a collection of publicly available accurate, empirical data which ticks these boxes useful when forming the business case for your own next project or justifying to management the benefits of investing in good information and records management?

JISC infoNet is currently undertaking a JISC-funded project ‘Creating a common research framework for measuring the impact of records management’. The Framework will include the means by which a record-related process or task can be deconstructed and measured both before and after the implementation of the RM solution, allowing the effect of the change to be measured and compared with the costs incurred by achieving it.

Part of the project involves carrying out a process of research to discover the current state of the evidence base for demonstrating the quantifiable benefits of implementing records management processes. To this end we are interested to discover the extent to which organisations are currently measuring or monitoring the impact of records management processes and also to assess what metrics the profession will find of value.

We are keen to get in touch with organisations which have implemented records management initiatives and undertaken any form of measurement of the impact that these initiatives have had. Such initiatives can be large or small and the means of measuring their effectiveness either complex or rudimentary – we are interested in them all.

As such, we would be grateful if you could take a few minutes to answer this short survey by 12th June 2009. Please note that this survey is open to all sectors and is not just limited to universities and colleges and we would welcome the thoughts and views from practitioners working in other sectors too.