Implementing Records Management in Social Work Department With No budget and No Technology

Conference 2010 S04 - Monday 10.30am

On 25 August 2008, Dumfries & Galloway Council successfully rolled out a records management system to 1400 staff, at no cost, and with no extra resources. It has successfully withstood a reorganisation at both the corporate level and at service level and has the buy-in from all staff.

It wasn’t rocket science - we even saved money. How did we do it? We will be discussing:

Design
Classification
Retention Schedule
Overcoming objections and possible stumbling blocks
Overcoming negative attitudes from IT
What lessons we learned during training and how we applied these lessons
Purest versus pragmatic records management approach
Buy-in
Management support
Implementation

The work that has been carried out will lead to an easy migration to EDRMS should the Council decide to pursue this route at a later date. I’ll also be looking at some of the key points from our recent external review e.g. lessons learned and savings.

I will make no pretence - it wasn’t easy - but it’s very satisfying to see the end result with coordination of classification, file plan, naming convention and templates, across a huge geographical region. You can do it too.

Martyn Lockwood, Dumfries & Galloway Council

Martyn is the Information Management Officer for Social Work Services in Dumfries & Galloway Council. His remit includes Records Management, FOI(S)A, Internet and Intranet for Social Work Services. He also has a corporate role for Records Management. He joined Dumfries &... more...

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