In response to one of Doug's questions:

<snip> (1) How can IT and RIM work more closely together in providing
for the management of electronic records?

...
Our County organization has addressed this by positioning the fledgling
RM Program within the IT Department, with the intent to have the RIM
Program grow into it's own Department at the enterprise level. The
result is a better understanding of the needs of both groups, and
coordinated efforts among them. Of course in this case the IT Director
is currently responsible for the success of both groups, which helps
tremendously. We participate in several activities jointly, such as:

(a) As the IT group reviews and revises the Disaster Recovery Plan, the
Records staff participate as observers to see how the business processes
associated with this work, and to gain insight into the terminology and
the specific nuances to the IT group (i.e. incremental vs. differential
backups: what content is captured with each, which results in faster
recovery, what is the IT group's current approach and why, etc). 

(b) As the RIM team creates and updates the Records Archive Plan, IT
participates to understand RIM requirements, and to coordinate the
physical archiving of electronic records. The specific terminology
defined by IT in the DR practice crosses over to the Records Archive
Plan, and participants already have a common understanding of the
differences and advantages of creating archive baselines, and then
incremental and/or differential archives from the baseline, based on
prior discussions and current DR practices.

(c) Public access to 95% of our electronic records is required. However
the volume of records (over 5TB) presents a challenge for a small
County. IT and RIM must partner together once again - RIM defining what
is publicly accessible and when, and IT implementing the tools to make
it happen. Our solution is to make the metadata accessible through the
internet within 24 hours of becoming an official record, with electronic
records accessibility driven by the record "state": on-line, near
on-line, offline, and disposed, based on records type (i.e. last
accessed within 60 days, 1yr, >1yr, or purged).

These are a couple of examples of RIM and IT successfully working
together. In our case the partner ship is "forced", as RIM is embedded
within IT, and managed by one leader. As the RIM group grows into it's
own Department, new challenges will no doubt be presented. 

Of course an alternative org chart could have the IT group reporting to
the RIM Director, but I am guessing that is not to occur in my lifetime.

Susan M.
RIM Administrator

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