Agency Business Systems and Records Andrew Waugh

1. Agency Business Systems
and
Records
Andrew Waugh
Senior Manager, Standards and Policy
Public Record Office Victoria

2. Structure of this presentation
• What is a business system?
• Do business systems hold records?
• How do we make sure that business systems
hold records
• Preserving records from business systems

3. What is a business system?
• Automated systems that create or manage
data about an organisation’s activities.
– CRM, Case management, Court
management, License registration, Archival
Control!
• High value records – important enough to
spend money on a system to manage them

4. Do business systems keep records?
• In Victoria we have recently asserted that
digital data and digital records are so close
that they are effectively the same thing
• May not be permanent records

5. What is the record?
• What is the record in a business system?
– Transactions (data modifications and results of
queries)
– Part of the data (a subset of the data that needs to
be identified and extracted)
– All of the data in the system

6. Business systems & records
• Business systems often lack the functions
necessary to create good records
– Records are not put away, they cannot be
disposed of, and they cannot be archived
• ICA project to address this problem
– Guidelines and functional requirements for records
in business systems
– Now also an ISO standard (ISO 16175-3:2010)

7. Simplifying the ICA Requirements
• ICA Requirements are extremely complex and
hard to understand
• PROV took the requirements and simplified
them by looking at two typical implementation
scenarios
• Now part of an ongoing ICA project

8. Scenario 1:
Standalone business system
• Business system creates, manages and
disposes of records itself
• Typically built using some form of relational
database
• Simplification: records managed are
constrained by implementation decisions
• Key functions: putting away records,
documenting history, disposal, and export

9. Scenario 2:
Create but not manage
• Business systems creates the records but
then transfers them to an EDRMS for
management
• Example: transactional database systems
• Simplification: only need to worry about
creation, a touch of management, and export
• Key functions: putting away records,
preventing modification and export

10. Preserving
business application records
• What happens when
– When business system is decommissioned
– When business system is replaced and records
not in operational use are ‘archived’
• Affects agencies (long term temporary) and
archives (permanent records)

11. How are the records represented?
• Critical issue – how will future users access
the records and what use will they make of it
• Options
– Copy all or some of the underlying tables
– Produce a single report from the application
– Map to traditional file/record model and
produce reports
• Greatest good for the greatest number?

12. Any Questions?