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Implementing a Records Management
Technology Solution for European
Public Organizations: The Challenge
DLM Forum 2014 Annual General Meeting
Tassos Anagnostopoulos
Solutions Architect
[email protected]
Athens, 11 June 2014
Uni Systems at a glance
50 years of solid IT
experience
Uni Systems was founded in 1964.
35+ years of Banking experience.
15+ years of Telecom experience.
480+ specialized business &
technology professionals
200 S/W Engineers, 150 System &
Support Engineers, 50 Business
Consultants
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Lead systems integrator &
solutions provider in
international market
More than 25 international
customers including E.C., EU
agencies, etc.
65+ M€ Total Revenues (2013)
52+ M€ Services, & Consulting
11+ M€ EU Institutions, Agencies
and International Organisations
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A Reference in the European ICT Service Sector
Using Greece as its base, Uni Systems is positioned as a key SI player in the
emerging SE European, MENA and EU region.
 Major ICT Systems Integrator in
the domestic market
 Key contractor for central EU
Institutions & Agencies
 Among the top solutions
providers in the region of SouthEastern Europe & Turkey
 Expand to MENA and GCC
countries with targeted solutions
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EU Customers and Projects
A Company with an International orientation:
ECDC
ECHA
EMA
EUROPOL
FRONTEX
European Commission
(TAXUD, DEVCO, CLIMA,
ECHO, JRC, etc), Council
of EU, etc
Publications
Office, EIB,
Eurostat
Republic of
Serbia EuropeAid
Albania EuropeAid
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Motivation for the Presentation
•
We’ve seen that RM systems,
– from a theoretical perspective are very concrete in their design and offer
a full set of related functionalities
– but in practice, they tend to be quite difficult to use, often resulting in
their misuse. E.g.,
• Mass declaration of records at the end of the work week, often including useless
information
• Misclassification of records, which can be very difficult to detect.
•
Because of this, RM enablement of organizations often fails, or is
limited in its applicability and usefulness.
– If the initial deployment is faulty or ridden with problems, then the
(already big) resistance to its introduction will be even bigger, and any
attempts to expand it will be faced with skepticism.
– It is very important that the RM system implementation is successful from
the very beginning.
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Key Challenges when Implementing a Records
Management System
• Multiple sources of information that need to be
consolidated
– E-Mails
– Incoming documents, often in paper form
– Generated documents, which may also need to
be scanned in order to capture a signature on them
• File Plan may be well structured, but will usually be way too
complex for the average user
– Main difficulty is importing records into the system
• Not always clear where a record should go
• Very cumbersome process to manually select where in the filing plan a
record should be placed
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Common Mistakes in the Design of an RM Solution
• Basing the requirements gathering process on MoReq, instead of
the actual needs of the Organization.
– MoReq should be used to give ideas, not as a starting point.
Attempting to start by implementing MoReq in its entirety is a definite
path to failure.
• Focusing on the completeness of the solution instead of the easeof-use
– Modern-day RM systems provide all or most of the required
functionality for managing records once they are in the RM system.
– However, a lot still needs to be done in the way regular end users
interact with the RM system when declaring a record.
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Records vs. Document Management
•
RM tool can be same or different from the Document Management
Tool.
– For example, in European Medicines Agency (“EMA”), the same tool
(Documentum) is used for DM and RM. This makes it easier to introduce it
to end users, as they are more accustomed to the concept of Filing Plan.
•
•
•
This may also lead to an approach to RM that is not as solid as it
should be, having documents and records stored side-by-side (called
“Informal Record Management”).
However, it is still desirable to be able to
trace the origins of a record, for the case
of documents.
Overall, having a common DM and RM tool is
something that is desirable, although by no
means mandatory.
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Granting External Users Access to an RM System
• Another issue that we have encountered was the need to expose
some parts of the Filing Plan to a select group of people outside an
organization.
• The mistake in the approach was the fact that the implementation
had tried to grant the external participants direct access to the RM
system, complicating the design of the system and adding to it
responsibilities that didn’t really belong there.
– Better approach is to separate any such requirement for publishing of
information, by having a separate system to take care of that
(authentication of external users, which groups should access which
set of records, etc.)
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RM at the European Chemical Agency (“ECHA”)
• Two different approaches, depending on the Filing Plan Class:
– Explicit record declaration process, via a queue where regular users
import the artifacts that should become records.
• End Users have to browse through the entire filing plan in order to find the
right place where the record should be stored.
• A Contributor subsequently retrieves potential records from the queue,
and declares the imported artifacts as records.
– Implicit record declaration process, at the conclusion of a workflow.
• All data is already there, only piece of information that is missing is
whether the data should become a record or not.
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The Basic Requirements for a
Successful RM Implementation
• Make the record definition process as
transparent as possible to the end
user.
• Provide to the non-specialized users
very specific options, which should be
limited in number.
• End users should not necessarily have a full and clear view of the
Filing Plan; rather, the record declaration process should act similar
to a Wizard, only asking the questions that really need to be asked.
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Recommendation: Keep the Record Declaration
Information Where It Needs to Be
• We cannot expect all members of the Organization
to become intimately familiar with the Filing Plan
and the inner workings of a RM tool.
• We should shield them from the complexity of the
process of declaring a record, or even of identifying
documents and mails as potential records.
• Instead, this should be done transparently
to them by the appropriate tools employed
by the organization.
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For Large Organizations, Separate the Duties
• Have a system be responsible for gathering all records related to a
case or a subject.
– This can be a workflow management system, where documents and
mails are gathered and generated as part of the case management
flow.
– Can also be a plain document management
system, where all documents and
correspondence are maintained in a
common place.
– Or a Line-of-Business application (e.g. ERP
or CRM system) if it provides some basic
document management capabilities.
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For Large Organizations, Separate the Duties
• In all above, the “entity” (case or subject) in question is clearly
defined and is accompanied by all required metadata, allowing it
to easily become a record (or set of records) in an automated way
• Create a concrete mapping
between the above systems and
the RM system, defining all aspects
related to the storing of the record,
the grouping of the artifacts
contained in it, the location in the
filing plan, the policies that should
be applied, etc.
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For Large Organizations, Separate the Duties
•
•
•
•
Make Regular users only responsible for gathering the information, but
otherwise shield them from any deeper knowledge of the RM system.
Have Process Owners responsible for establishing the appropriate
mappings. These are embodied within the system that gathers the
records, in effect shielding both the RM system and its users for
requiring detailed knowledge about the specifics of the particular
process.
Record Managers can focus on maintaining the definition of policies
and retention periods, knowing that they need not worry about the
proper use of the tool.
It may still be necessary to have a direct way of manually adding
records into the RM system.
– This should be targeted to specific groups of users (e.g. secretaries) that
have a good understanding of the Filing Plan and can be trained to acquire
some basic “Librarian” skills.
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Conclusion - Best Practices
• Start small. Define a pilot process that you want to become RMenabled.
– This will help key stakeholders understand the complexity associated
with an RM implementation, without burdening the entire
organization.
– It will also make key people become more familiar with RM concepts
– Define both an explicit and an implicit way of declaring records.
– Based on the lessons learned from the pilot implementation, design
the approach for RM enabling the rest of the organization, to the
extent that this is feasible by real-world circumstances.
• Automate the record definition process, and hide the complexity
of the RM implementation from the regular end users.
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Thank you!
www.unisystems.com
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