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A RIM program audit is a vital-checkup that every organization needs to ensure that it is operating at its unique, optimal health level
When people are sick, their bodies experience an information management crisis. Essentially, the critical supporting components of the body's defense mechanisms are not getting the right information at the right time to facilitate the best possible reaction to the intruders.
An organization - whether small, medium, or large; government, publicly traded, or private - is like a body: it can also get sick. The records and information that course through it each day must get to the right people at the right time in order to support the organization's optimum health.
Just as people go to the doctor for checkups to ensure their good health and for diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring when they are ill, undergoing a records and information management (RIM) audit provides an organization the necessary checkup, diagnosis, and treatment to ensure its good health.
In metaphorical terms, if records and information - both physical and electronic - are the life-giving blood in an organization's body, then the conduits, or programs, by which they flow are the organization's circulatory system. A RIM audit is a critical dissection and evaluation of the processes that manage records and information flows throughout their lifecyde.
Defining the Stakeholders and Drivers
Like people, every organization is unique. Each has its own personality, objectives, stakeholders, drivers, and performance measures. The audit team must identify and understand each of these elements in order to shape the audit to meet the organization's unique needs.
A significant step in the audit is to identify the stakeholders involved in and affected by the RIM program and those stakeholders' drivers. (See Figure 1.)
Recognizing the stakeholders and understanding their diverse drivers will provide insight into the needs driving the RIM program audit and empower the audit team with the ability to connect with the stakeholders in the context of their functions.
Although everyone within an organization creates records and information and is responsible for that content, the audit team must identify and use key personnel, or champions, from within each stakeholder group to keep the process moving. This step requires buy-in from these individuals - a task that can...