Guest editorial

Citation

Tough, A. (2009), "Guest editorial", Records Management Journal, Vol. 19 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/rmj.2009.28119caa.002

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Records Management Journal, Volume 19, Issue 3

This issue consists of an opinion piece and five articles from Commonwealth countries in Africa and the Far East. At first sight, records managers in the UK may wonder to what extent these are relevant to their daily concerns. However, careful reading demonstrates that several of the issues raised here are pertinent to British (and other) colleagues. Possibly this demonstrates the enduring legacy of the Commonwealth administrative and record-keeping traditions.

Sangmin Lee has worked at the National Archives of Korea, the Research Institute for Korean Archives and Records and was Team Leader in the “Government Records Management Innovation Committee” in the Presidential Committee for Government Innovation from 2004 to 2005 before moving into the private sector. His opinion piece is a courageous report on recent developments in Korea and reminds us that records management cannot be divorced from the political context in which it is carried out.

Sunday Popoola’s study of organizational commitment amongst records management personnel demonstrates that a key challenge in Nigeria is the retention of highly skilled staff. Throughout Africa it has been the case that those with degrees, and especially higher degree level qualifications in archives and records management, are frequently lost from the public service to financial institutions and large corporations. As Dr Popoola expresses it: “the more there is an increase in educational qualification of the respondents, the lower their organizational commitment”. Henry Kemoni’s survey of the literature on electronic records management in Eastern and Southern Africa reflects a widespread emphasis on the need for records professionals to be trained in advanced IT skills. If Dr Popoola’s study is correct, giving IT skills to records managers is likely to create even more acute problems of staff retention. Experience in the Tanzania Public Sector Reform Project underlines this point. No Tanzanian IT professional could be induced to work on the major payroll database project as a civil servant. Instead they were appointed as temporary consultants on much higher salaries. The Payroll Management and Establishment Control Project in Zambia demonstrated a similar pattern.

The established hierarchies of many civil services assign records professionals an unduly lowly position, which is reflected in salaries. In developing countries the only satisfactory long-term solution is likely to be to change long-ingrained habits of thought and to elevate the status of the most highly skilled personnel. Even where excellent policy documents and guidelines exist, as Dr Kemoni demonstrates to be the case in respect of the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa, these are no substitute for intermediation by skilled professional staff.

Zawiyah Mohammad Yusof’s research on compliance with statutory record keeping requirements by financial institutions raises an intriguing question. Malaysia has a culture of compliance with established norms. Yet the financial institutions investigated (in 2005) knowingly disregarded legal standards for record keeping systems. Zawiyah Mohammad Yusof suggests that this may be due to the puny penalties for breaking the law.

The Malaysian situation is, of course, part of a wider phenomenon. The Nick Leeson affair, which destroyed Barings Bank, provided an early signal that all was not well. Then there was the Enron scandal, which resulted in the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the USA. Although the red lights were becoming increasingly obvious, still the the global financial system kept careering on until the world-wide banking crisis of September 2008. A major factor in the making of the crisis has been a tendency to merge outward facing business functions with support activities, much to the detriment of records management. Leeson, based in Singapore, was able to destroy a 300 years old British institution in a matter of days because he could both sign contracts and authorize payments. If older and more prudent banking practices had been followed, this would have been impossible. Interestingly, Peter Emmerson has demonstrated that Barclays Bank invested in records management at a time when many rivals were doing the opposite because non-executive directors insisted on a coherent risk management strategy (Emmerson, 2008). It is hardly coincidental that Barclays have fared better than most banks in the global economic downturn. It would seem likely that prudent and conservative approaches to the management of business will now re-emerge, both to meet the demands of regulators and to avoid the loss of reputation and public confidence that can be particularly damaging to financial institutions.

Availability of adequate financial resources does not in itself guarantee success in RM improvement programmes. This seems to be a clear finding of Lorato Motsaathebe and Nathan Mnjama’s research in relation to court records in Botswana. An automated court record system has been introduced but this is not functioning in a fully satisfactory way. It appears this is due, in part at least, to document scanning being carried out neither comprehensively, nor to a high standard.

A remarkable aspect of the contributions to this issue is the success that the authors have had in obtaining responses to questionnaires. Umi Asma Mokhtar and Zawiyah Mohammad Yusof had 72 per cent of their questionnaires re RM policy in Malaysia returned. Lorato Motsaathebe and Nathan Mnjama achieved a 90 per cent response rate to their questionnaire on court records in Botswana. However, their observations carried out on site suggest that the quality of the responses was not uniformly high. Sunday Popoola obtained a 91.7 per cent rate of returns. Most impressive of all is the 100 per cent response rate to Zawiyah Mohammad Yusof’s questionnaire on compliance with statutory record keeping requirements on the part of financial institutions in Malaysia. Possibly readers in the UK and elsewhere in the “developed” world could learn something about persistence and persuasion from the contributors of these articles.

Alistair ToughChancellor College, Malawi/University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK