Benefits of Adopting a Records Management Programme
The key question which you will always be asked is 'What is this going to cost?'
That is a difficult question to answer definitively because in part it will depend upon the size of the institution, the results of the information audit (discussed later), the length of time that is available to achieve results, and the amount of human resource available for the task.
The honest and short answer is that there will always be upfront costs but the aim is that these will reduce both revenue and capital expenditure over a 3-5 year period and produce on-going business efficiencies. Exactly how you go about calculating this will depend upon the accounting systems in your institution. The specific matters about which you need information from your finance, property and/or HR department are:
How property costs are calculated. What you are after is the serviced cost per square metre of floor area in buildings occupied by your institution. This will vary enormously depending upon where you are located, major City centre or countryside. It is entirely possible that the information will not be available in this form and that you will have to make a rough estimate from the information which you can get.
How depreciation of equipment is calculated. A PC may be considered to be worth nothing after 4 years whereas shelving or furniture may only be written off after 15 years. The potential problem here is that your institution may not have made such calculations, or even have a full scale equipment and furniture inventory. Again you will have to make an estimate based on such information as you can get.
The average cost per hour of staff at various grading levels. If you are going to attempt to calculate the value of staff time saved by increased efficiency you need to know what it costs in the first place.
Some facts which you might like to take as your starting point.
An information audit usually produces at least a 50% saving in office filing requirement and even more in storage areas. This benefit can be calculated in terms of the cost of the floor area saved which could be better used for other purposes. It is also a benefit to add the cost of equipment released for other purposes or equipment purchases saved. This is a one-off benefit that can be used to help off-set the initial costs.
If your institution is moving to new premises or a department is moving to a new building it is rare to have as much storage space as in old buildings. This is usually seen as an opportunity for a clear out. At a practical level what often happens is that the non-current records are thrown into boxes and then are sent to commercial storage. Rational retrieval is almost impossible because rubbish is mixed with valuable records and it is rare for box contents to be recorded in a retrievable form. The category 'Principal's miscellaneous files, 2001-4' is not helpful particularly if there are another 20 boxes labelled in the same way. Managing that process and the on-going cost is a major opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of formal records management.
It was recently estimated by a consultancy firm that 45% of administrative staff time is spent retrieving information of one sort or another. If that time can be improved to 20% or 10% then there is a clear on-going productivity gain whose financial benefits can be calculated.
One example of a worked-out cost /benefit example is provided by the AFFIRM project, which was developed by the Western Colleges Consortium as part of a major JISC records management programme.
Crude financial measures, such as unit costing, may prove beneficial to you in the initial stages of your role particularly because some of the gains can be very large in an institution that is inefficient in its records management. What is difficult is to keep producing this level of financial benefit year-on-year as records management becomes the norm.
One further financial measure which you should consider is the costs which would be applied to your institution if you failed to comply, or were unable to comply, with the legislation and regulation under which you operate. This is not simply a matter of the financial penalties for legal non-compliance but also the legal fees and increased insurance premiums which might also be applied in particular circumstances.
In the medium and long-term you may wish to develop non-financial measures to sit alongside these. These are other targets, which reflect your own experience and needs, and to which you commit publicly. These may well include public service level agreements and performance targets endorsed by senior management. In commercial companies all these measures are brought together into a 'balanced score card', whose targets are assessed annually and if necessary adjusted. There is a very large literature on this subject. Although this method of assessing efficiency is just beginning to make an impact in UK institutions its use is more developed in the US - further information is available from The Balanced Scorecard Institute
Non-financial benefits can be summarised in the following way
Efficiency
Information can always be retrieved quickly and reliably
Information is available to support strategic decision making
Access to the collective memory of an institution provides precedents for actions, and should prevent the need to 're-invent the wheel'
Streamlined business processes (functional analysis is a core part of a systematic records management programme)
Reduced compliance and regulatory retrieval costs
Better utilisation of prime office space (characterised by reducing the number of filing cabinets full of obsolete paper in offices, and increasing people space)
Reduced overhead costs of storage and retrieval of information
Competitive Advantage
Long-term management of physical assets
Improved public image by ability to respond quickly and appropriately to requests for information
Ability to respond quickly to new situations
