Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Compliance and Mouth Wash

Just read a great Post by Alan P-S (Apologies to Alan Pelz-Sharpe for the name abbreviation) on the CMSWatch site around Compliance being a dirty word, follow the link for the full noise.

I agree with the points that Alan raises, and see alignment of the the topic of his conversation to my local patch, being New Zealand. Here we have a thing called the Public Records Act that has been published by Archives NZ, a great piece of work by the way.

It is a broad umbrella Act that outlines the requirements that organisations need to achieve to obtain a suitable level of records compliance. The act is further supported with a whole framework of guidelines and standards so yo are not left hanging in space, even further great work.

But here is a secret, you can if you want to meet all the requirements without technology! Sure it would take a huge effort and lot of management and people, but you can do it. Yes, technology can make the job easier, but technology is only the supporting act to the process and people involved that combine to make it all happen and help an organisation meet its records management obligations. I fully support the comments that Alan makes around organisation going back to good old retention and disposition tools, rather than having a fancy "out of the box" compliance product.

If there is one thing that I am tired of hearing around the traps in NZ is this:

"Our <name technology here> is PRA compliant !!!

Compliant to what? Firstly there is not testing against any standard and secondly there are no magic solutions with a flick of setup.exe that will take the place of the necessary elements of:

  • Business alignment,
  • Judicious planning & business case justification
  • Competent change management, and
  • Solid IM, IT and Project management disciplines
Technology by itself will not do it, and at best can only provide some support to the overall programme of work. Guess we need to break out the soap bar to wash out the dirty words !

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