Assessing Records Management Functionality for Your Systems

Written by Alan Chapman on 26 February 2019.

National Archives of Australia (NAA) have set timelines for all Australian Government agencies to assess and take action for all business systems to ensure they:
  • Meet the minimum metadata standard
  • Meet the functional requirements for information management
They also require agencies to establish appropriate information governance arrangements. To assist with this process the NAA have developed a business systems assessment framework. The framework is a high-level pragmatic risk-based approach to assessing business systems against minimum functionality required to underpin records management in the agency. It also considered the requirements for the transfer of records to NAA for preservation.

The key issues that arise when undertaking the assessment are:
  • Lack of detailed understanding of records management in business and technical team members
  • Business systems have not been designed to hold all of the required metadata
  • Business systems allow operations that destroy or overwrite information that is required for correct record keeping
  • Disposal functionality is not implemented in the business systems and appropriate metadata is not stored to allow disposal at the end of life of the system
NAA Business systems assessment Framework
NAA Business Systems Assessment Framework

That said there is a path through for most systems whether that is some small changes to functionality; planned decommissioning and replacement with a compliant system; or, the extraction of records to a central records management system where they can be maintained.

And agencies building or procuring new systems will need to use the framework to drive requirements to ensure that new systems have appropriate records management functionality. This applies to all business systems built or procured after December 2016.

If you are working on business systems in an Australian Government agency or are a software supplier to those agencies you need to get your approach to this happening now.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for help getting started, performing assessments or getting your software compliant.

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