Standards tactics
The fourth vital tactic is to ensure that you follow established standards when designing and implementing your solution. These can be grouped into two broad areas - functional or best practice standards and technical standards. We briefly review each in turn.
Functional standards
In stage two we advocated following a standard project management methodology based on the JISC infoKit. Such a methodology should impose consistency and standards in all aspects of the project. EDRM will be a new concept to many staff and it is vital that all stakeholders, internal staff, consultants, suppliers etc involved in the project use a standard methodology and as far as possible standard terms, standard documentation and standard training materials so the whole project provides a consistent message to its customers.
This is not easily achieved in an industry where marketing pressures result in an ever-changing set of acronyms and titles. However, by establishing a glossary of terms and a set of document templates and a consistent set of promotional and training materials you can do a lot to ensure you enforce consistency and avoid confusion.
This toolkit will give you a standard set of stages and steps to follow when planning your project in stage two and when promoting the project, the plan and the timetable for completion.
The National Archives 2002 Functional Requirements for ERMS defines all the key functional standards you will need to follow for ERM system functionality and most of the core high level document capture and document and content management functional standards. The TNA standard and the E Government Metadata Standard define the key metadata standards you need to follow as well. These need to be added to where required to meet your specific requirements. This process is reviewed in more detail in stage six.
The JISC infoNet Business Classification Scheme and Records Retention Schedule along with guidance authored by Elizabeth Parker provides a standard model to follow when conducting your analysis of business activity and developing your functions based classification scheme.
There are a number of other areas where standards or models of best practice need to be agreed in the education community. The first would be a thesaurus of terms that all can build on. The second would be a list of legislation impacting the record keeping obligations of education organisations.
