Vlad

It would help if we all knew a bit more about your organisation - size,
geographic spread, function, government or non-government etc. But even
without that, and before you get bogged down in metrics, reorganisations and
other mundanity, consider your marketing and posture. You already have RM
positioned as a strategic function - great. Build on that.

Step one is, stop calling it 'mailroom'. A mailroom is a place, not a
function. We call ours 'Document Distribution', which immediately positions
us better to move into the electronic world, and not by the overly
simplistic "scan incoming mail and flick it electronically around the
organisation" - you can get out there and persuade business units to go
electronic, and to persuade them to get their customers and suppliers to go
electronic. The strategy is not to turn paper into electronic when it hits
the 'mailroom', it is to stop paper coming in at all. By running the
'mailroom' you have a finger on a pulse which allows you to identify areas
of significant potential improvement. Sell document distribution as a
consultancy, and very much part of RM.

For example, I know that 50% of the mail items in our pigeonholes each
morning, are internal mail envelopes going from our 85 business units in 35
different locations, going to Accounts Payable and to Payroll. So if I can
help the AP manager to extend her existing program to get our suppliers to
send invoices electronically, and if I can trigger a move to go fully
electronic for overtime forms and leave applications, I can probably free up
one staff member. A lot of doing precisely that is helping ensure the
integrity of processes and electronic documents and containers from an RM
point of view. Not part of RM? Ha.

Then you market it as a service: what do the team do best? They know at a
detailed level who lives where, what they do, and what sort of documents
they deal with. Not RM? Ha. That knowledge is actually an important part of
RM, especially if you are into functional classifications. And unless your
organisation is unlike any other I've seen over the last too many years,
finding out who does what, at the micro level, is the hardest part of what I
might call Knowledge Management.

The other thing the team does best is to move large lumps of stuff from one
place to another. Sell that as a service too, and you'll gradually get
involved in projects of all sorts (eg marketing, IT, staff relocations etc),
at the planning stage. So you become proactive instead of reactive, and can
start introducing electronic distribution as an alternative to hardcopy.

Internally, you can make Doc Distribution part of RM too. Do you still
manage any hardcopy records? Got the odd compactus or two? Offsite storage?
We do, so I've restructured the RM team so they are customers of
Distribution. Want files from the compactus or offsite, or put back there?
Distribution does it, not RM. Are there any files to go from Records out to
customers? Distribution again. I also run library services (yep, another
ex-librarian in Records), so Distribution fetches, puts away and distributes
library materials (and we are switching to fully electronic in that area
too, as fast as I can manage it - no books!).

What this does is free up our small number of expensive RM and Library staff
to do high level professional work. So I have three informal and highly
overlapping teams: records, library and logistics, which includes document
distribution, formerly known as mailroom.
Don't forget that equipment and facilities are part of being professional:
Document Distribution is very visible - our team get to every part of head
office twice a day, and they are even more visible now I've scrapped the old
scungy trolleys they had in favour of shiny new red ones - it's all part of
the professional posture, and as any pertol head knows, red ones go
faster. At my previous job I had to move the 'mailroom' out of a a grimy
hole in the basement, so they had the same desks as the rest of us, their
own personal space, windows and airconditioning. I've worked with too many
organisations which treat 'mailroom' in quite a shameful way. Hopefully you
don't have that problem.

Finally, while I obviously believe in RM / DM / KM as high level, strategic
services, it also helps when times are tight to have a very visible
operational service. You need both.

Cheers

Glenn

Glenn Sanders
[log in to unmask]
Australia

These views are mine alone. They may or may not be those of any
previous or present employers or clients. I don't know. If I'd asked
and they'd agreed, I would have signed it "Harry Peck and Co and
Glenn". Or whatever. But I haven't, so I didn't.

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
To unsubscribe from this list, click the below link. If not already present, place UNSUBSCRIBE RECMGMT-L or UNSUB RECMGMT-L in the body of the message.
mailto:[log in to unmask]