How to Go About Information Gathering
There are a number of possible approaches to the task of getting the necessary information:
A formal questionnaire
Selective, but unstructured, interviews with members of staff
Structured interviews with key members of staff
Practical experience suggests strongly that the scattergun approach of a questionnaire to all members of staff has a small success rate. Response rates of less than 20% are very common.
An unstructured interview almost certainly means that items will be missed, forgotten or ignored as 'not being important or relevant'.
The structured interview with key staff, almost certainly the people responsible for Departmental, school or faculty administration in the first instance, will give the whole exercise a shape and will also provide the leads to other important sources of information within the same area. This should be allowed for in the project plan, and if used carefully, is not a bad way of proceeding. It also allows a single department/faculty/school to be dealt with in a single pass and the audit process to move on elsewhere in the institution.
The Questions to be Asked
The questions should be phrased in such a way as to evoke a yes/no or purely factual answer. It is very important to think through carefully the questions which need to be answered. They have to be related to the purpose of the survey and the way in which the results will be used. There is no standard format for this, and some questions which might be highly relevant to one audit could be equally unimportant in another.
On the other hand the audit is a one-off opportunity which cannot be repeated very quickly, so it should be as comprehensive as possible. The most economical way to deal with this is to set it up as a table in a database. This would allow some of the preliminary analysis to be done using the properties of the database. We have provided a template of the way this might look and an example. However the template offered in this infoKit is not intended to be comprehensive. There are matters which every institution will want to add as part of its audit.
The Physical Inventory
The physical inventory starts with the identification of all the places used in a department for storage and the equipment make and model being used. This will include filing drawers, cabinets, cupboards, and locations where the department reckons to store material off-site. You should record this as the audit progresses.
Equally important is to have a look at all PCs, note how and whether they are networked, the packages used and the existing ground rules for e-mail and internet use. Some institutions will already do this type of auditing as part of their IT function and the information will be available. In many cases such equipment will be included in the central asset management register which should be easy to access. This will, among other things, tell you when equipment was bought and therefore how old it is and where it sits on a probable replacement cycle.
In either case close collaboration and support from IT colleagues will be vital.
Next Steps
Analysis of the returns from the information gathering stage will quickly reveal:
Areas where the business processes are being supported adequately by record keeping.
Areas where changes will have to be made because external statutory or regulatory requirements are not being met.
Areas where records management processes are haphazard and where a regular system must be introduced.
Areas where business could be improved by simplifying a procedure.
Areas where the record, and therefore the institution, is at risk.
The major task is to create a report defining what is required to ensure compliance with all legislation and regulations.
The second step is to draw up a Retention Schedule for all types of record encountered. It is to be expected that in larger institutions different practices and standards will prevail in different parts of the organisation. It is vital from the point of view both of Freedom of Information and Data Protection that these are standardised across the institution, agreed and enforced. See the section on Records Retention Schedules.
Finally it is useful to suggest how long records might usefully remain in a working area or current file for current business purposes and when they could safely be moved to semi-current storage. The aim is to keep the current working area and systems as uncluttered as possible and focused on the immediate business.
