People Facet

Outputs and Findings

The first facet of the investigative phase of the project related to the human and ‘people’ aspects of managing e-records. It included vision; awareness; culture; drivers and barriers; and the implication of such factors for the implementation of recordkeeping systems.

Participants in the Delphi Study on the people and human aspects of ERM responded to five rounds of questions to identify, explore, and clarify the issues and solutions. We analysed the participants' responses using a range of different approaches (subject themes, numerical ratings, subjective explorations) to provide a broad view of the data. The outputs were produced in textual, numerical, graphical and diagrammatic forms to support different cognitive styles.

The study was carried out over five rounds, moving from identification and exploration of the issues through ranking them in order of urgency or importance to suggesting solutions. Finally, an online survey was conducted to discover how the wider RM profession and other stakeholder groups rated the solutions in terms of their desirability, feasibility, impact, priority and urgency.

The primary method of analysing or summarising the data received was by thematic analysis; the resulting analyses or summaries were then presented in a variety of textual, schematic or visual ways. The issues examined in Round 5 of the Study and the solutions proposed by the participants were combined with relevant aspects of the responses to previous rounds and then subjected to phenomenological analysis. Full details of these methodological approaches are given in the publication AC+erm Project: Philosophical, Paradigmatic and Methodological Underpinnings, available via the Project Approach section, and elaborations are also included in the output documents themselves.
 
The outputs from the Delphi Study have been split into two documents, one containing thematic analyses and summaries, the other phenomenological analyses (both documents are available through the links at the bottom of this page). The contents of these documents are summarized briefly below:

Thematic Analyses:–
 •  All rounds – lists of questions
 •  Round 1 – preliminary thematic analysis of issues (text)
 •  Round 3 – ranking of issues in terms of urgency/importance (graphs and tables)
 •  Round 4 – solutions to issues: approaches that work and approaches to avoid (PDF files of mind-maps, including text-only version; word clouds)
 •  Survey – summary of responses to online survey (text and tables).

[Note: separate analysis was not carried on data from Round 2.]

Phenomenological Analyses:– 
Round 5 – phenomenological analysis of selected issues (in combination with data from previous rounds)
The output consists of the list of the analyses of the seven topics selected for examination. The topics were divided up between project team members; any given analysis was written by a single member of the team.

The list of topics analyzed is as follows:
 •  Actors and Contexts
 •  The Records Management ‘Bottom Line’
 •  Change Management
 •  Cultural Change
 •  Essential Skills for Records Management
 •  Management Class Change
 •  Professional ‘Turf Wars’