Functional Analysis

This is the second of the five phases of the records management process.

It is worth re-emphasising four points which have been made already:

• Records Management and the audit is a corporate responsibility. One of the long-term objectives of the information audit is to ensure that different areas of the organisation handle records with the same function in exactly the same way and according to identical criteria. Specifically, student records in faculty, school or department x need to be dealt with in exactly the same way as those in Y. The larger the College or University, and the more devolved the management structure, the greater the likelihood of significant variations in practice.
• Although you will have gathered the information according to the existing organisational structure of the institution, there is no need to organise your findings in this way. You will find that the function of admitting students is more or less the same business processes throughout your institution. It is obviously better if everybody uses the same terms for this process, since this is one category of information that is likely to be shared. Put simply, your analysis of the information received will be made according to the purpose or function for which the record was created rather than by the department which created it.
• Some elements of this approach to record keeping already exist in the e-systems of most institutions. The development of workspaces in servers which can be shared by a group of co-workers fundamentally requires an agreed naming structure for files, and agreed management processes.
• One other reason for approaching the task in this way is that although the organisational structure of your College or University will change (for example when departments merge) the fundamental reason for creating the record tends to be unchanged. Those functions which stop with organisational change can simply become 'closed' records series, while those that continue show that underlying continuity. It also means that there does not need to be constant revision of the structural plan for records, because most new record types can be accommodated within the existing structure. If a completely new function is created this can be added.

This way of looking at the record classification process is fundamental to successful records management and is usually designated functional analysis. It is the key tool for achieving intellectual control of an institution's records and the business processes which created them.

The usual term used to describe the output from this is a corporate file plan, and the agreed naming conventions the taxonomy.