The main goal of this study is to demonstrate how a management records system increase the level of organizational governance. It also shows how corporate governance interacts with record managers. With that purpose, a descriptive analysis of a qualitative, exploratory, and facetted nature is carried out based on literature and records management standards, with emphasis on the standard ISO 30301:2019 edited on records management (RM). In addition, a comparative analysis of the principles and critical factors of governance is carried out in order to compare them and systematize relations with those of the MSR. As a result, the authors seek to identify the determining critical factors and relationships, both with the most prominent elements as components of governance, and with their basic principles: openness, participation, responsibility, efficiency, and consistency. The results of the study highlight the close relationship between them and show a greater presence in the ISO 30301 standard.
TopIntroduction
Organizational memory represents the explicit or recorded knowledge of organizations. In the archival post-custodial approach, the Continuum Records theory (Upward, 1996) recognizes it as the fruit of the third dimension called “organizing”. That is, to institutionalize. In this dimension, the data derived from tasks and records, resulting from departmental or functional activities and business processes, conform the institutional identity in the transactional/identity axis. This axis is built considering the role of individuals in a workplace and their responsibility to collaborate in the success of the mission.
Following the graphic interpretation of Upward (1996), there are four dimensions around the intersection of the axis of evidence/recordkeeping with the axis of transactional/identity. The actions defined within these dimensions allow to recognize the organizational and social memories. In this regard, the institutional archive is created, captured and organized, until it starts to be considered memory / archive of society, already pluralized over time (fourth dimension of post-custodial).
Thus, out of the four dimensions proposed by Upward: create, capture, organize and pluralize, only the third one feeds on recorded knowledge - tangible or not and information relevant to the organizational context. The purpose of storing and serving these informational and documentary resources is to facilitate and promote access, use and reuse in organizations (Pereira, Silva and Pinto, 2016).
In this line, Neves and Cerdeira (2018) focus on the relevance for organizations of creating/capturing, using, preserving and disposing the memory of the knowledge accumulated in their history and organizational processes, knowing that its preservation facilitates sharing and maintaining the knowledge of the organization, seeking to be a guarantee of permanence, regardless of the turnover of its members.
The aforementioned dimensions are not watertight, but dynamic packages. Their components are interrelated, immersed in the waves of continuous change that organizations experience; these transformations are motivated by the competence in national and international markets, such as technological and communication changes in administrations. In this regard, organizations create and capture informational intangibles supposed to an extreme fluidity in acts/processes “reactivated, copied, redefined, represented differently in remote and unknown points of each other” (Katelaar, Delgado-Gómez, 2009, p.70) for which, they should maintain their metanarrative context and their digital continuity.
To this extent, organizations are eager to set up digital workshops, to be competitive and to show good governance practices. All without the slightest loss of control. Van Bussel (2018, p.45) emphasizes the respect ad characteristics of “hyper-scale and hyper-connectivity” through which markets, deeply technological and connected, change at great speed, presenting multiple possibilities to innovate and evolve, whenever organizations understand it.
The magnitude of these changes has an impact on the conformation of organizational memory and its management, since the work environment, object, method, purpose and users' needs differ from those used to it, and new requirements arise that have an impact on Archival Science and its profession. The result of this transformation is the paradigm of post-custody in which a relevant exchange is produced: the new role and relevance of records management (RM), to such an extent that in Archival Science, its reflection closely mirrors the gravitation it exerts on it. In this sense, Sebastiá Salat (2009) manifests himself, qualifying the exchange as dynamic and I continue to quote A. J. Gilliland-Swetland who stresses that this “adopts, adapts, develops, ands sheds princes and practices of the constituent information communities as necessary”. (p.19). Similarly, Cruz Mundet (2016, p. 155) stresses the globalization of Records Management (RM) and its repercussion on Science and archivist profession, detailing how RM modernizes, visualizes, integrates, demands and normalizes.
Numerous factors contribute to transform, of which the following stand out: