Dear All,
Thank you to everyone who responded to my enquiry regarding RM/DP/FOI
structures the feedback has been extremely useful and clarified what I
already thought - there's not a simple answer! I promised to feedback to
the list so I've tried to summarise the feedback below, I've seperated out
the HE feedback.
HE (26 responses)
I received 26 responsed for HEIs where the RM/FOI/DP functions generally
sit together, although this is not always the case. The functions are
based in a variety of places - student registry, legal department etc but
for the majority of institutions it is placed either in IT/Library
Services or centrally under the Registrar/Secretary. There seems to be a
clear preference to be placed centrally so that the function has the
associated authoirty or with IT due to the growing demands of electronic
records, and there is often a link with the University (paper based)
Archives too.
Staffing levels vary and the inclusion of additional responsabilities
(Information Security, copyright, EIR, archives, etc) increases the
staffing levels. In the majority of responses there was one individual
responsible for RM/FOI/DP, sometimes as part of a larger team with wider
responsabilities. Where there is only one person responsible for
RM/FOI/DP it seems that FOI/DP take the majoirty of time with less spent
on RM.
In several institutions where EDRMS was/is being introduced this is as a
project with a project lead (i.e not the Records Manager).
I also received 16 responses from other organisations (non HE) the
responses for these are much more varied, however, the RM function again
frequently sits in IT or as a central support service where it can benefit
from high profile senior maanagement support. As expected the staffing
varies according to size of authority/organisation but is frequently only
1 fte.
I hope this is of interest - and thanks again for all the input.
Caroline
|