ERM and people issues

Interim results from the systematic literature review

The interim results from the systematic literature review covering ‘people issues’ are now available from the project website http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/slr/ 56 articles were reviewed. An overview of the issues discussed is as follows:

Societal and national issues

• Need to cover societal issues related to recordkeeping and e-records


• Need to build national e-records management (ERM) infrastructure, and embed ERM into e-government programmes

Professional issues

• Records professionals struggling with ERM


• Records professionals’ records management (RM) role threatened by other professions as ERM emerges


• Records professionals need to develop their IT/ERM skills


• Other professions/stakeholders have different perceptions of ERM compared with records professionals


• Need to extend RM/ERM knowledge to other professions
  Need partnership working between records / information management (IM) / information systems / IT professionals

Users/staff

• Personalisation of corporate records in e-environment: end users see the records as ‘theirs’, not as a corporate resource


• Control of e-communication conflicts with the spontaneity and informality that make it so useful and popular in the first place


• RM/IM is not a high priority for staff


• Staff need training in RM basics


• Need for user-friendly ERM systems (ERMS)

ERM/ERMS implementation

• ERM causes change in organizational status, relationships between managers and workers, and work practices


• Resistance to organizational and cultural changes caused by ERM


• Change management needed when implementing ERM

ERM implementation requires:

• strategic development, good planning, leadership and organisational commitment, staff involvement and cooperative working, staff awareness raising and training

Many of the problems facing ERMS implementation are behavioural rather than technical
The results of the systematic literature review are informing the data collection phases of the project. The first data collection phase - Designing an Architecture, the People Facet - is being conducted via a series of e-Delphis. The findings from the systematic literature review on people issues determined the initial topics discussed in these e-Delphis.