<1. Do you designate an Office of Record for each (or for some) record
series on the public/published edition of your schedule?>

What is an Office of Record? Is it something like identifying the owner of
a record class or business activity? And reflecting that somewhere in a
records retention schedule? Why would anyone do that? 'Office' implies a
particular group of people.

So now I'm going off on a tangent on the issue of record ownership.
Identifying owners of records belongs NOWHERE in the company records
retention schedule but is essential elsewhere, particularly in RM policy.

The retention schedule should identify business activity, not owners. The
functional retention schedule, now the norm, aims to classify based on
business activity, regardless of who carries it out. Classification based
on ownership by some group of people is artificial due to endless
'departmental reorgs' or 'restacks' (one of my favorite nonsense corporate
jargon terms). It doesn't matter what you call yourself or how you
officially define your department's scope, it's the business activities you
actually do, reflected in real records you actually create, that determines
what your record is about and how long to keep it. That is a good
progressive basis for classifying records. So why would a records manager
undermine that by reverting to a departmental/owner based retention
schedule or by adding 'office of record' assignment to a functional
retention schedule?

Records managers don't have the power to assign ownership of business
activities across the organization. Nor to assign which office is the boss
of which other office. Even if records managers were looped in to the
ever-changing 'restacks' and knew at every moment who was the latest
official owner of a business activity, trying to reflect that in a
retention schedule would mean weekly changes. Retention schedules are
supposed to be stable. But really, there would never be meaningful usable
consensus about who owns which business process - not in any way that a
records manager could codify in a retention schedule. Ownership of business
activities is a daily political battle in organizations. Every new
employee, or newly formed business unit, redesigns the wheel and redefines
their ownership boundaries - especially in IT. And they usually don't even
communicate with those affected by their latest move in their game of Risk,
let alone with the records manager or the rest of the company.

As ISO 15489 says, one of the main purposes of RM policy is to identify
roles and responsibilities for managing records. To do that you must
identify ownership - of the business activity and the records that are
by-products of the activity. The buck needs to stop somewhere, with an
identifiable job role having ultimate ownership and responsibility for
recordkeeping and RM policy compliance. Otherwise, if everyone is
responsible then no one is responsible. RM policy should state that the
ultimate owner is the head of whatever business unit created the record.
That means record owner is the record creator (or owner is the record
receiver if record created outside i.e. by customers, vendors etc.). That
kind of policy statement gives the records manager a starting point, and
some authority, to referee record ownership disputes. Disputes are usually
over who is responsible for recordkeeping tasks, and the records manager
can now frame this as an ownership question with owner, by default, being
whoever created the record, whether they want to be owner or not. The
concept of 'head of a business unit' is easy because organizations are good
at defining who reports to whom, who is in charge. Organizations live by
org charts.

So the retention schedule should identify business activity, not ownership
of records by groups of people, job roles or office locations.Records
managers have to tease out, in the retention schedule, a neutral
description of business activity free of ownership descriptions. The place
for record ownership concepts is the RM policy.


>
> Maureen Cusack
San Francisco, CA
[log in to unmask]

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]