Impact Calculator
The pilot project at King's College London (KCL) was ambitious in scope and covered thirteen different identified measureable benefits. The project team divided these into three main areas reflecting their different foci: appraisal, electronic records and knowledge and used a different iteration of the IC for each.
The Appraisal element of the KCL project delivered a headline figure of a 96% saving in the time taken to retrieve a file from an average accession with a box list, compared with one without is certainly an impressive improvement and one which it is calculated results in a saving of £33.18 per retrieval. However, what limits the overall extent of the economic savings made in this example is the low retrieval rate of the records affected by this project, with just five such records being requested in 2009/10. This, combined with ongoing costs of over £1000 per annum to operate the appraisal process, means that this represents yet another instance of where an investment in records appraisal based purely on economic grounds will never demonstrate a return on investment.
Changes to the storage of electronic records within the KCL estates department appear to yield some impressive returns on investment with over £10,000 per annum being saved, resulting in a cumulative monetary impact of £45,390 by the end of Year 5. As all these savings are being realised solely as a consequence of reduced electronic storage costs this represents an interesting contrast to the experience at Nottingham where such savings were negligible. The main difference with the Kings experience is the volume of data affected, once again intimating that the economic argument for investment in records management often only really becomes apparent when applied to a substantial volume of records and that such arguments are much weaker when dealing with comparatively small volumes of records. The logic behind this statement may be self-evident, but raises interesting (and, one suspects, largely hitherto un-examined) questions about what constitutes the minimum volume of records required to justify investment in records management based purely on economic factors.
Download pilot results: King's College London Spreadsheet
