Open Government Partnership New Zealand National Action Plan 2018-2020
Progress report for: December 2018 – April 2019
Commitment 10 progress report: December 2018 to April 2019
Commitment 10: Monitoring the effectiveness of public body information management practices
Lead agency: Department of Internal Affairs (Archives New Zealand)
Objective: To make the management of government information more visible and therefore transparent by developing and implementing a monitoring framework that supports public reporting on the effectiveness of information management by central and local government agencies.
Ambition: New Zealanders and public agencies will be able to see the standards for management of government information and the rates of progress central and local government agencies are making towards meeting those standards.
OGP values: Transparency and accountability
Milestones
Milestone 1
Develop a proposed monitoring framework that reflects the Information and Records Management Standard and includes a suite of consistent and relevant measures to enable public visibility of the effectiveness of agency information management. This could include technology to enable a whole-of-system view of government information holdings and the effectiveness of its management
Commenced: July 2018 – December 2018
Progress: Completed
Milestone 2
Communication and engagement: the proposed framework and its potential options will be consulted on with regulated parties and other potential users
Commenced: July 2018 – July 2019
Progress: Underway
Milestone 3
Rolling it out. Ensuring that the implemented monitoring activity is useful for, and easily used by, the regulated agencies to improve performance and that a common
view of results is available to all stakeholders (including the public)
Commenced: April 2019 – July 2020
Progress: Underway
What we have been doing
- Established an internal working group to provide quality assurance on the development of the survey questionnaire
- Refining and approving the questions in the survey to ensure that they align to the information management standard and the Public Records Act 2005
- Developing high level requirements for a survey tool
- Exploring options of the type of survey tool required to deliver the survey
- Preparation for user testing – developed questionnaire/user testing internal and external
- Selecting internal and external user testing groups to participate in the survey prior to roll out in June 2019
- External and internal engagement in March – May 2019 (Milestone 2)
- Preparing for roll out of survey in June 2019 (Milestone 3)
How we are including diverse voices
- The survey will provide a view of information management performance across the sector and inform our audit programme. While public sector agencies serve and represent diverse communities, this programme is not directly engaging with those communities. Findings from survey and audit will be published in the Chief Archivist’s Annual Report on the State of Government Recordkeeping. The findings might indicate areas of concern where recordkeeping does not support government accountability if it does not reflect diversity in the community.
- We engage with concerned members of the public if there are issues of potential breach of compliance with Public Records Act 2005. This engagement will help us to identify issues across the system.
How we are keeping diverse communities informed
- Through the Chief Archivist’s Annual Report on the State of Government Recordkeeping
- Current updates on our online channel
- Presentations to audiences from IPANZ (Institute of Public Administration New Zealand) and ALGIM (Association of Local Government Information Management).
What’s next?
- Publish web page on archives.govt.nz dedicated to Commitment 10.
- Engage with local government to test appetite for voluntary audit
- Continue participating in cross-agency Maturity Framework Working Group (functional leads and Archives New Zealand). The group is looking at the extent to which it makes sense to combine or share elements of different frameworks, to reduce the compliance burden on stakeholders and make navigating the difference frameworks easier.
Links – Evidence of progress and milestones acheved
- Findings from Regulatory Programme News Item – https://archives.govt.nz/findings-from-regulatory-programme-engagement