Content and scope of Step C

• Overview
• Aim of Step C
• Summary of Step C
• Why should you do Step C?
• How is Step C scalable?
• Relationship to other steps

Overview

This section in an introduction to Step C: Identification of recordkeeping requirements. This section:

• outlines the aim of Step C
• summarises the major elements of Step C
• explains why it is important to undertake Step C for particular DIRKS projects
• indicates how Step C is scalable and when it is necessary to complete, and
• shows how Step C relates to the other steps in the DIRKS methodology.

Aim of Step C

The aim of Step C is to identify and document your recordkeeping requirements. Recordkeeping requirements are requirements arising from regulatory sources, business needs and community expectations. They identify the types of records you need to create and the management framework you need to establish in order to have and accountably manage all the business information that is necessary for your organisation.

Many DIRKS projects require knowledge of your recordkeeping requirements, so that you can determine whether your current practices are actually meeting your business needs, and so that you can design systems that fully meet your range of requirements.

Summary of Step C

Step C is concerned with finding and documenting the recordkeeping requirements that exist either for your whole organisation, or in relation to particular functions, activities, processes or business systems. These may be broad requirements relating to the jurisdiction or industry your organisation operates within, or may be specific to your particular business. Such requirements may be explicit or implicit.

Documentary sources and interviews provide information on recordkeeping requirements. You need to collect and analyse these sources so you can identify your:

• business needs
• legal and regulatory obligations, and
• community expectations.

You also need to:

• define the type of requirement (ie what it is requiring you to do in terms of creation, capture, disposal, access, form, content and/or quality) so that you can plan whether and how to satisfy it
• map requirements to your functions and activities (your BCS if you have completed Step B) so the business context of the requirements is clear

If there are recordkeeping requirements your organisation does not wish to satisfy, perhaps due to cost or other difficulties they impose, you will need to identify your organisation's exposure to risk if these evidential requirements are not addressed. The main product of Step C, then, is set of requirements the organisation has agreed to meet (which may be limited according to the scope of your project).

Why should you do Step C?

Opportunities from knowing your requirements

Step C is a crucial step in designing a recordkeeping system. If you know exactly what your recordkeeping requirements are you can ensure:

• you make effective use of records management resources
• your organisation is meeting its requirements and conducting business in line with best practice.

Step C can assist you to obtain:

• an understanding of the requirements to create and keep records as evidence in relation to specific business activities
• an appreciation of your organisation's level of exposure to evidence-related risks (such as failures in accountability, legal action)
• a basis for designing tools that can facilitate good recordkeeping
• a benchmark for assessing your current systems (Step D)
• a basis for determining the range of recordkeeping strategies which best enable your organisation to meet their recordkeeping requirements (Step E), and
• the basis for developing functional specifications for recordkeeping systems, including software products (Step F).

Consequences of not knowing your requirements

If your organisation is not aware of its recordkeeping requirements it might:

• unnecessarily keep records it doesn’t need to maintain, which is inefficient and costly
• fail to create records that it is required to keep
• manage records inappropriately, or
• keep records for insufficient periods of time, which will expose the organisation to certain risks and prevent business being conducted effectively.

How is Step C scalable?

Relate to the project scope

Step C is essential to most DIRKS projects because it provides the benchmark to measure systems against. The only time it need not be completed is if you already know your organisation's recordkeeping requirements in detail and know the risks of not meeting them. However, Step C can be scaled down for particular projects. See Doing your DIRKS project for how Step C specifically applies to particular projects.

Existing frameworks to map requirements to

You may already have frameworks in existence derived from Step B: Analysis of business activity or from existing recordkeeping tools such as function based thesauri or retention and disposal authorities. These will give you the structure to map your recordkeeping requirements to, so you can scale down your examination of recordkeeping requirements to a particular function.

Example: The personnel management function
In Step B: Analysis of business activity there was reference to the council that had decided to analyse the business conducted within their human resources function. Their aim was to improve their current practices and to identify their recordkeeping requirements and determine their levels of compliance. They chose to use the function of PERSONNEL and related activities from the Keyword for Councils thesaurus as a basis for their business classification scheme.
In Step C they could focus on finding recordkeeping requirements relating directly to the personnel function, or broadly affecting it, and exclude the requirements that did not have implications for this function.

When frameworks do not exist

As discussed in Step B: Analysis of business activity, if your organisation's core functions are not covered by a classification scheme of any kind, it is not advisable to try to analyse a core function or system in isolation. You should at least roughly map your core business functions and activities and consider issues which may affect them before trying to concentrate on the recordkeeping requirements relating to one function or system.

The reason for this is that:

• you need a broad perspective of the boundaries of the function or system and how it relates to, and impacts on, other business activities being performed
• you may discover when taking a broader view that there are other areas of high risk that may warrant priority in subsequent stages of the design and implementation process. These areas may correlate to particular recordkeeping systems, business activities or business units.
• if you analyse one function or system in isolation, without a broader map, you may inadvertently cross boundaries of other functions and may miss requirement and risk identification. These omissions may force you to revise your analysis later.

See Sources for Step C for more information about other sources that can save you time and effort in your project.

Relationship to other steps

Steps A and B

You may have completed either all or parts of Step A: Preliminary investigation and Step B:Analysis of business activity before undertaking Step C. The earlier steps contribute to Step C in the following ways:

• the investigation in Step A and analysis in Step B allow you to understand your organisation and the context in which it operates, including areas of risk
• the business analysis and scheme produced in Step B provides a workable structure that you can link recordkeeping requirements to in order to understand their context
• the sources you examine in Steps A and B will contain a range of recordkeeping requirements.

If you have not conducted the earlier steps, you will need to have a good knowledge of the organisation and its functions and practices and be prepared to do some research into sources for Step C. You will also need to develop or have in place a suitable way of mapping your recordkeeping requirements to their business context.

Step D

The recordkeeping requirements identified and agreed to in Step C provide a benchmark for assessing the operation of your existing systems in Step D: Assessment of existing systems.

While the identification of current recordkeeping systems is carried out in Step D, some initial work can also be done during Step C.

Example: Identifying systems that keep records
During the process of identifying records currently created in the organisation you may discover that records are kept in a variety of formal systems such as the centralised registry system, human resource management system, the financial management system, as well as ad hoc systems maintained by individual officers at their desks. Document this information as you come across it, rather than duplicating your effort at a later stage.

Step E

The strategies for meeting recordkeeping requirements that you select in Step E: Identification of strategies for recordkeeping will be chosen to suit the nature of the recordkeeping requirements identified in Step C.