Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

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Last week the members of the EDRMS Implementers Discussion Group met to talk about establishing business rules as part of an EDRMS implementation. Members shared the different approaches taken by their organisations to determine when records will be captured to the EDRMS (e.g. when initially drafted? when approved or finalised?), how they will be captured (e.g. manually by creators? as part of a workflow?) and by whom (e.g. creators? reviewers? approvers?)

The discussion raised a very interesting issue: successful EDRMS implementations are linked to having a good understanding of an organisation’s business needs for information. Detailed business process analysis can determine where records are created or received in a specific business process and when, how and by whom these records should be captured. However in the ‘real world’, especially for large organisations subject to frequent change and re-organisation, this type of analysis isn’t always possible. These organisations may only be able to develop generic business rules for when records should be captured and leave it up to individual business units to interpret and adjust these with regard to their own business processes. Read the rest of this entry »

As usual, Government Recordkeeping staff have been asked lots of interesting questions about digital information management and recordkeeping issues in March and April.

Here is a sample of some of these questions and our responses.

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In the lead up to our next EDRMS implementer’s discussion group meeting later this month, here are some more electronic document and records management systems (EDRMS) implementation strategies that we have been discussing with an agency currently starting off their implementation project. Read the rest of this entry »

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We have been having some really interesting conversations with a  range of organisations about their business systems and the types of records they are making and keeping about their business systems. Read the rest of this entry »

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The NSW Government is establishing a brand new Community of ICT Professionals to:

• disseminate information of interest and relevance to all NSW ICT professionals
• promote case studies of innovative ICT practice
• generate new ideas for ICT innovation
• help create an informed ICT workforce

Membership is open to all NSW Public Sector employees working in any area of ICT. We strongly encourage all NSW Government-based readers of Future Proof to join. The Community will provide a fantastic opportunity to learn, share insights and collaborate with colleagues working in all areas of NSW Government ICT. Read the rest of this entry »

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This week the members of the EDRMS Implementers Discussion Group met for the first time to talk about their organisations’ experiences in implementing systems to support digital recordkeeping. This is a new group facilitated by State Records to promote the sharing and re-use of ideas, tools and approaches for implementing EDRMS (electronic document and records management systems).

Members of the group engaged in a lively discussion about some of the challenges and opportunities presented by the move to digital recordkeeping. In the spirit of sharing, we thought we would summarise the discussion and some of the solutions to particular challenges proposed by members.

Membership of this group is open to anyone in the NSW public sector who is keen to share their organisation’s experiences of transitioning to digital recordkeeping. If you would like to join this group, please contact us at govrec@records.nsw.gov.au.

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I was pleased at the last Records Managers Forum to be able to talk about a recent initiative from State Records, OpenGov NSW. OpenGov NSW is a searchable online repository for information published by NSW Government agencies, including Annual Reports, other publications and open access information released under the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 (GIPA Act).

The published information it contains is both contemporary and historical, and currently runs at over 2000 titles. Some of the publications of note in OpenGov include a complete set of Government Gazettes 2001-2013 19th and early 20th century digitised Annual Reports for the Department of Public Works and the Police Child Welfare Department Annual Reports from the  mid 20th century, and plenty of current NSW Government published information such as 2011-12 Annual Reports, strategic plans and policy documents.

Better access to government information

OpenGov directly supports the NSW Government’s commitment to improved access to government information. Goal 31 of the State Plan 2021 is ‘Improve government transparency by increasing access to government information’. An action that was defined to achieve this goal was to ‘expand the Publications NSW website to include access to all agency information published as ‘open access’ under GIPA.’ OpenGov is the new successor to Publications NSW. Read the rest of this entry »

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In mid March I spoke at State Records’ regular Records Managers Forum about what you need to do to implement effective social media recordkeeping in your organisation.

Other presentations at the Forum were:

• Dawn Routledge and Sonya Sherman, Information, ICT Policy, Department of Finance and Services – Developing the NSW information management framework
• Cassie Findlay, Project Manager, Digital Archives, State Records NSW – OpenGov NSW web site initiative

Podcasts and slides for each of our presentations are on the Future Proof Podcast page, but I thought I would post a short summary of some of the key points from my talk here.

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Here are some of the interesting questions we were asked in January and February about a whole host of digital recordkeeping issues. If you have any feedback for us on our advice, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

• How can I apply metadata to social media records?
• We used the government’s online recruitment tool Taleo to manage all aspects of our recruiting operations. The applications received for each position advertised are kept and managed in Taleo and not kept on the recruitment files.  Can you please advise if this is acceptable? Also, can you please advise what other type of documents are to be kept on the recruitment file, knowing that we use Taleo?
• We have a new business system – how do I know if it needs to be compliant with the Standard on digital recordkeeping?
• Are there any issues if I buy an off-the-shelf software package and then customise it a lot?
• Should my organisation use Google Groups as an official business communication tool?
• We scan in black and white, but a member of our legal team has said that for some of their work, different coloured pens or stamps have important meaning. What should we do?
• Are your podcasts available via iTunes, or downloadable to a mobile or other device?
• We are implementing a new electronic business system to manage financial transactions and property management. Records about these processes will be made and managed in the system. Under the Standard on digital recordkeeping, do we need to do a metadata mapping for this system? Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday we ran another of our Managing recordkeeping risk in business systems workshops. It has been a while since I have posted an update about this workshop and we had a really great group in yesterday with lots of interesting discussions, so here is a summary of some of the key points we talked about. Read the rest of this entry »