Government seeks to integrate various components of its organisations to present a unified view of citizens, such as with its Cape Town Unicity, but is struggling to deal with historical silos of paper-based information. Paul Mullon, marketing director at Metrofile, believes there is a solution.
South African municipalities are faced with integrating a plethora of departments that historically were paper-based in their operation. Processes were designed to cater to these silo-driven organisations, and resulted in little cross-departmental communication.
When Cape Town`s Unicity was created in December 2000, effectively combining the six metropolitan local councils of Blaauwberg Municipality, City of Cape Town, City of Tygerberg, Heidelberg Municipality, Oostenberg Municipality, South Peninsula Municipality and the Cape Metropolitan Council, this problem was simply compounded as the silos within silos tried to communicate with one another.
The Unicity merger has been through the pain and other government departments will have to learn some of the lessons if they are to achieve similar success, particularly for national integration. In fact, any paper-driven organisation will have to learn these lessons if they seek integration within departments.
Paper-driven organisations such as municipalities are also being driven toward integration and implementation of records management solutions by legislation. In the case of private companies, the King II Report and the Financial Advisors and Intermediary Services Act are examples of legislation behind good corporate governance, while with government the National Archives and Records Service (NARS) is driving integration as it seeks to build nine provincial archives centres.
To this end, government is attempting to create a new archives system under the auspices of the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa Act.
The task it faces is immense, with over 50 million pages of paper-based records in urgent need of restoration. In the process it has a strategic intent to repair and maintain its air conditioning system, establish a microfilm unit while other digital imaging options are investigated, expand its restoration unit and train new staff for in-house repair work.
In the interim it must deal with the issue of establishing and maintaining its records management system. Two of the most important lessons it is learning are to develop an effective content management strategy before attempting integration of municipalities and metropolitan local councils, and appointing trained, or training, records managers.
Government has already stepped off in the right direction, and in terms of the new Act has created a records management policy to achieve a number of goals:
* Securing professional liaison with every governmental body subject to the operation of the new Act;
* Expanding its training programme to embrace middle and senior managers;
* Developing an effective unit for advising client offices on electronic records management; and
* Developing a fully fledged macro appraisal programme to ensure systematic, strategic and planned archival appraisal of all government records systems.
Finding capable records managers is a problem for government. Records managers are more than simply librarians or archivists, which are traditionally the fields from which they are drawn. That is why training is critical if government is to achieve its stated objective. At the same time, IT professionals, with whom records managers must today constantly interact, have little or no records management experience or qualifications.
Another issue in training records managers is that librarians and archivists have little experience in dealing with top management, something that under new legislation they will be required to do. The challenge is to take this untrained pool of people and empower their education.
Mergers and acquisitions are tough enough as it is, without having to facing these challenges. What government can do about the situation right now is what many private concerns are doing: turn to a third-party or outsourced supplier that can develop a strategic plan hand-in-hand with the right departments, implement the records management solution and perform a skills transfer, by which stage NARS and the various departments should have their own systems fully operational.
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Metrofile is the South African market leader in the management of business documents, and is committed to help customers reduce costs and improve productivity in processes that are centred on documents and corporate records.
All companies have a combination of paper and electronic documents, and are forced by law and customer requirements to secure the availability of the documents for the duration of their lifecycle. For most organisations, the volume of documents is growing at an exponential rate, and is becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
Metrofile is uniquely positioned to provide consulting and implementation of full lifecycle paper and electronic records management solutions from storage and conversion through to destruction.
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