National Archives and Records Administration
Successful Procedures for Business Process Analysis: Identifying and Implementing
Recordkeeping Requirements in New Systems Design
Benchmarking Questionnaire
Date/time of interview
Organization name
Location
Official #1 Official #2 Official #3
Name of Official
Title
Unit
Telephone
E-mail address
Mailing address
Interviewer(s) name/title
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Part 1: Organizational Information
1. What are your organization’s major lines of business?
2. How many people are employed by your organization?
3. Where are the Records Management and IT departments placed within the structure of the
organization?
4. Please describe how records management staff works with IT departments and business units
within your organization.
Probes
• To what extent do records management staff and the information technology group
collaborate?
• To what extent do staffs from the business units and records management collaborate?
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Part 2: Structure and Application of Business Process Analysis (or other
process to identify and implement recordkeeping requirements for new IT systems
design)
1. What process does your organization use to ensure that recordkeeping requirements are
identified during the business process analysis and met in new IT systems design? What do
you call your process?
• What approach or model do you use in analyzing your business processes?
• What approach or model do you use in developing your system requirements?
• Is documentation for your process available? Can you share it with us?
2. What unit of the organization “owns” this process? (RM, IT, CIO, process owners, etc.)
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3. How do you determine the scope of your business process analysis? How do you break
down your functions into appropriate process steps? How far do you break down or
decompose your functions?
4. In what situations do you apply this process? (All IT projects, all reengineering projects, all
projects over a certain size or dollar value, only when a project manager is interested..?)
5. What techniques do you use in gathering information? (Answers might include conducting
and documenting interviews, developing questionnaires and surveys, and analyzing existing
workflow models.)
6. How do you relate recordkeeping requirements analysis to business process analysis?
7. Do you have a methodology specifically for eliciting, documenting, and validating
recordkeeping requirements? What is your methodology? (Are recordkeeping requirements
elicited as part of the same process that elicits all other requirements? If so, what
adjustments did you need to make to the general process?)
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8. Which stakeholders identify and define recordkeeping requirements?
9. What authorities or standards do you apply in identifying recordkeeping requirements? (e.g.
laws, regulations, professional best practices, organizational practice, community
expectations?
10. How do you integrate identified recordkeeping requirements into your information systems
design?
• Are performance measurements identified and defined for integration of recordkeeping
requirements?
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Part 3: Development and Roll-out of Business Process Analysis
1. How long have you been using this process?
2. Why did your organization adopt this process? What triggered the adoption of this process?
3. What were your primary goals in adopting this process?
4. Who in the organization was the champion or driver for adopting this process?
5. Who participated in developing your business process improvement/systems design process
(e.g. program managers, project managers, records managers, IT staff, legal staff)? Who
participated in integrating the recordkeeping analysis into the process?
6. What barriers to understanding among the participants did you encounter, if any? How did
you overcome these barriers?
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7. What skills did staff involved in the process need to function effectively? How did you
ensure that staff had those skills?
8. How did you get management support for adopting your process?
9. Did your organization develop a business case for adopting this process? If so, what were
the key elements of the business case?
Follow-up Question
• Is documentation of the business case available? Can you share it with us?
10. What obstacles did you face in instituting your process?
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Part 4: Assessment of Business Process Analysis
1. What kind of results have you experienced with this process?
Follow-up Questions
What metrics, if any, are associated with the results? Can you point to ways in which your
approach has saved the organization money? Can you demonstrate “costs foregone”
because of your approach?
2. Please describe your organization’s experience with this process.
Probes
• What are the strengths of your process?
• What are the weaknesses of your process?
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• How is your organization addressing these weaknesses?
• What aspects of the process work best and why?
• What aspects of the process are the most difficult and why?
• Is there anything you would like to change about your process? What would you
change? Why?
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Interviewer’s Comments
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