Stage 3: information gathering and analysis
Reason for stage
This stage is designed to help the project team to plan, timetable and resource their information gathering for the project and the analysis that follows. This stage recommends good practice and provides a number of tools to use in the information gathering.
Definition of stage
As described in stage one when looking at defining and scoping the project this stage assumes that you are conducting information gathering and analysis for a combined records management and EDRM procurement project. As far as possible it makes it clear which tasks are specific to an EDRM procurement. Stage 3 is divided up into four steps which closely equate to the first four information gathering and analysis steps advocated in the DIRKS manual published by the National Archives of Australia.
If you are in a small education organisation and are planning a records management project primarily to meet your FOI obligations and are not planning to implement an EDRM system currently then much of this stage will be unnecessarily complex and resource intensive for you. You should start with the JISC infoNet records management infoKit and then read this for an understanding of some of the additional steps you will need to conduct when you decide to procure an EDRM solution.
Step one looks at how to conduct a preliminary investigation to identify the role of your education organisation, its structure, the business and regulatory environment in which it operates and major factors affecting its record keeping practices including problems and risks.
Step two looks at how to analyse your business activity. This involves modelling what your education organisation does and how it does it by reviewing its business activities and processes. You will need to define the scope of the analysis and then identify and document each business function, activity and transaction within your scope. One of the key outputs from step two should be a business classification scheme based on a hierarchy of business functions, activities and transactions.
Step three looks specifically at how to identify and record your education organisation's record keeping requirements and to document the requirements in a structured and easily maintainable form.
Step four looks at how best to survey your education organisation's existing record keeping and other relevant information systems and to measure the extent to which they provide evidence of business activities or have the required functionality to do this. This is a vital step when planning an EDRM solution procurement.
Objectives of stage
Reading this stage an EDRM project team should be able to judge whether or not they have allowed enough time and resources to conduct all the fact finding and analysis stages of the project.
This stage reviews the information gathering and analysis stage of the project. The information gathering and analysis requirements for a records management project and an EDRM procurement project overlap considerably here. The preferred situation and the one which this toolkit assumes is that you are planning an overall records management programme that includes procuring an EDRM system. If you follow the steps outlined in this stage then at the end you should have gathered all the information you need to:
agree and implement the right record keeping strategies for your education organisation and
agree and implement the right EDRM solution for your education organisation.
If you have already started information gathering and analysis activities as part of a records management project then it should be clear which additional tasks in each step you will need to perform at a later stage when you set up an EDRM procurement project.
