Hi Lawrence,
From my empirical experience gained from working with British and international organisations, the main driver for records management is compliance. FOI is just one piece of legislation from a framework, there are many other regulations that mandate good records management. I have noticed that good records management is proportional with regulation: more the industry or public bodies are regulated, the better the recordkeeping. In that respect, the best records management practices are to be found in banking, insurance and pharmaceutical industry and the worst in international public organisations under extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ).
This can be explained in terms of risks of non-compliance. If this risk is low or inexistent (as for the ETJ bodies), the organisations won't spend resources for records management, and as a result their records will be poorly managed (I've seen a couple of such basket cases). If the risk is high and non-compliance comes with a price, the organisation (company) will put all resources in place for good RM, to minimize the risks of non-compliance. The cost of FOI for public bodies is actually the risk and associated costs of non-compliance.
I hope that my response helps.
To view the list archives go to: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=RECORDS-MANAGEMENT-UK
To unsubscribe from this list, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the words UNSUBSCRIBE RECORDS-MANAGEMENT-UK
For any technical queries re JISC please email [log in to unmask]
For any content based queries, please email [log in to unmask]
|