Improving Information and Records Management:
An Important Agenda for Sustainable Development
March 5, 1996
Speaker: Rick Barry, Information Management and
Technology (IM&T) Consultant, International Records Management Trust of
London and former Chief of the Office Systems Division and the Information
Services Division of the World Bank.
Summary
The presentation reported on missions carried out by the speaker in 1995 as
a consultant for the International Records Management Trust of London, and
partly funded by Britain's
Overseas Development Administration (ODA), to help raise awareness of public
and private sector senior officials in Uganda,
Zimbabwe and Ghana
to the existing and emerging trends in information management and information
technology. A similar mission is planned for Kenya.
His two month engagement involved conducting senior level interviews, seminars
and workshops in the executive branch of government and (in Ghana) the
legislative/judicial communities on topics such as the strategic use of
information in public sector reform, the potential of government records as
part of national information assets, the admissibility of records in court
proceedings and the importance of linking information in all forms--paper,
microform and electronic. The findings, including lessons for the development
assistance community, have a direct relevance for the World Bank Group.
The presentation indicated ways in which these African countries have been
obtaining and increasing inventories of late generation information technology
equipment, now as part of virtually every multilateral and bilateral donor
project. It outlined several findings of particular interest for the developing
countries, e.g.:
- the need to redress the
imbalance in focus between information technology (where nearly all the
focus is today) and information management (where there is little or no
focus today);
- need for national legislation
to protect the integrity of government paper/electronic records;
- the necessity of addressing
information management and technology standards; and
- the requirement to link paper
and electronic records and to clean up paper records before or while
automating them, etc.
Findings of importance to the donor community include:
- donor agencies are
unwittingly inflicting problems on these developing countries by not
taking account of standards issues and needs when including information
technology as part of lending and technical assistance projects;
- archives and records
management functionality is not being routinely built into application
programs being developed as part of donor projects, thus perpetuating
costly parallel treatment of paper and electronic records and lack of
preservation of electronic records, etc.
The presentation was followed by discussion and the IMRT videotapes on the
role of information and records in developing countries. The videos shown were:
- "The Gambia
Records Project: Internalizing Change and Administrative Reform" (28
min.)
- "Toward Good Government:
Records Management and Public Sector Reform in Tanzania"(24
min.)
- "Protecting the People:
Record Management and Citizens Rights in Ghana"(26
min.)
Copies of these videos are available to Bank Group staff at the Information,
Technology and Personnel (ITP) Resources
Center, ext. 82830.
Further reading:
For additional information, contact Rick Barry directly by e-mail.