DLM Forum’s triennial conference 2011: Interoperability – Promoting good governance through records management

Promoting good governance through records management

Mikko Eräkaski, Project Manager & Armi Helenius, Senior Research Officer,
National Archives of Finland (Finland)

Mikko Eräkaski and Armi Helenius gave an excellent insight in the Finnish approach towards records management and interoperability.

In Finland there is legislation in place that forces public bodies to consider interoperability. This legal statute states that:

• Public sector bodies must each plan and specify their own Enterprise Architecture.
• Business systems must meet interoperability requirements.
• Public sector bodies are obliged to use common services and information systems.

To support the act the National Archives have been working on the concept of the Lifecycle Management Plan (LCMP). LCMP’s define management requirements for the whole life-cycle of all records created or received in all business processes of an organization and the metadata required by SÄHKE2 (=national requirements for records management systems and processes).

The most interesting aspect of the LCMP approach in my opinion is the use of functional classification schemas as linking elements between the LCMP’s and business systems. Function class is a mandatory element in SÃKE2 and can be compared with the PIVOT approach in the Netherlands.

Taken from the presentation found on the DLM website 

The benefits of this approach is that if you are able to implement such schemes less effort needs to be put in cataloging and describing records: you could even gain real time information on transactions. The downside however is that it takes enormous efforts to manage such schemas. And thus issues on scalability and flexibility arise as well.

More on the LCMP and SÃKE2.