A Records Management strategy is fundamental to a sound records management programme. Many organisations hesitate or even fail to embark on development of the strategy as they believe that it is cumbersome, time consuming, and ends up on a shelf gathering dust. This doesn't need to be the case, and a fast-track process can result in the development of a records management strategy in 5 days.

The process starts with ensuring that the right stakeholders are involved from the beginning. Representatives from the records management unit, IT, legal, compliance, risk, and the business units should all be involved as they have different requirements and perceptions of records management. Their early involvement is crucial as they need to be part of the implementation moving forward. Records management is no longer relegated to the basement, and involves information on all media, scattered all around the organisation.

The records management strategy starts with understanding the organisation's overall corporate objectives, and ensuring that the records management programme is designed to deliver clear benefits against those objectives, with clear achievable goals, priorities and deliverables, in the shortest possible time.

Once the organisation's strategic goals are identified, records management strategic and tactical plans are created in alignment with the business goals, to ensure that records management is seen to be an integral and essential part of the organisation.

During the process it is important to continually engage with key stakeholders and business units to identify their requirements and concerns regarding records management. A high level audit should be conducted to determine the organisation's state of readiness and maturity for records management. This forms the baseline for creating priorities and a roadmap for implementation. The process must identify the need for both paper and electronic records management, and determines which type of system is best suited to the organisation's current state of readiness. Each organisation is different, with differing priorities and infrastructure.

This then is used as a basis to plot the way forward, taking the organisation's specific requirements into account. In addition to the initial roadmap, a change and communications plan should be designed and implemented to ensure that the programme gets the alignment from all necessary stakeholders.

Methodologies and processes to be used should be based on international best practice, and draw upon international standards where appropriate to guide the way forward.

This process shouldn't take more than a few days, and should be intensive. Once the plan is developed, the momentum should be maintained, and the tactical steps identified should be implemented immediately.