The need for effective information management
Legislation
Access to information is the central theme running through this stage; it is impossible to effectively scan your internal and external environments without it. But it can only help you achieve this if it is managed appropriately throughout all stages of its 'lifecycle'.
We all understand the need for effective record and information management and usually have well established local systems and processes in place to ensure it is achieved. What has changed in recent years is the need to take a consistent, strategic and institution-wide approach to this area.
Through legislation such as the Data Protection Act, Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulations there now exists a complex set of mandatory requirements governing the management and use of information and records.
Meanwhile there is a growing demand from funding and regulatory bodies for institutions to be able to demonstrate high standards of corporate accountability and good governance: qualities that rely heavily on evidence in the form of complete, accurate and reliable records for proof.
If properly resourced and managed a concerted effort to improve the consistency and quality of the information and records held by your institution should help to enable timely access to the right information at the right time to help inform planning and decision making and to facilitate effective analysis of information derived from multiple sources - both vital to realising the objectives of environment scanning outlined in this stage. It is able to achieve this by:
- ensuring the right information and records are being created by mapping the link between them and the business processes which create them
- identifying what information and records are held where
- agreeing common formats for information and record creation and description to enable their reuse and cross-analysis
- introducing standardised record design and automatically generating content to ensure the accuracy and quality control of their content
Underpinning all of these is an acknowledgement that it is the information, rather than the technology used to create and store it that must be the focus of any endeavours in this regard. This was a firm conclusion from the JISC Information Strategies Initiative work first carried out in the mid-1990s and revisited in 2008 and is the theory which underpins the Managing the Information Lifecycle infoKit which provides further information on this area and how to progress it within your institution.
