Assess and review how well information management policies and practices support your agency’s business activities and functions and complies with the Information Management Standard overall.
Relationship to the Information Management Standard
The last element of your agency’s Information Management Program (Program) is to assess and review how well its information management policies and practices:
- support your agency’s business activities and functions (Behaviour 2.8) and
- complies with the Information Management Standard (Standard) overall.
Self-assessment
The aims of self-assessment are to enable your agency to:
- assess the maturity and capability of your Program and
- identify gaps in complying with the behaviours mandated in the Standard.
This will:
- allow action to be taken, where needed, to address gaps and act on poor practice or where high value or high risk information assets are threatened
- sustain good practice
- allow continuous improvement to occur where the opportunity arises.
Your agency may choose to use the Self-Assessment Tool (Tool) as a first step in the review of an established Program to identify gaps for prioritisation. However, this Tool is the official tool that will be used by State Records as a survey mechanism under the SR Act.
The Tool enables an assessment of your agency against the behaviours that underpin the five principles in the Standard.
It is recommended to use the Tool on an annual basis to assess the Program’s compliance against the Standard and your agency’s overall information management governance maturity and capability.
The Tool is an excel spreadsheet which comprises four components:
- instructions for use
- detailed Assessment
- capability Model
- assessment Priorities.
Refer to the instructions within the Tool more information on its use.
Self-assessment methodology
The methodology behind the Tool offers a scalable, tiered approach to help identify areas of strength and weakness at each level of requirement. This will allow your agency to develop and implement actions to address weaknesses, improve outcomes and progress to the next level.
There are four levels of maturity and capability your agency can assess your current information management practices (maturity and capability) against:
- absent (level 0)
- basic (level 1)
- operational (level 2)
- proactive (level 3).
To comply with the Standard, your agency must satisfy at least the level 2 (operational) for each behaviour (under the principles of the Standard), unless a valid reason can be demonstrated why maintaining a lower level is acceptable. For example, due to agency operational or regulatory requirements, or level of risk identified.
Regardless of your agency's size, the Tool can be used by all and can be applied to:
- a whole agency
- one or more business units
- one or more business processes
- all information formats, or one or more information assets such as hardcopy information assets or the content of business systems.
Improvement priorities may be determined based on the level of risk to a particular business area and the information assets supporting that area.
Outcomes of the Self-assessment Tool
Both the Capability Model and Assessment Priorities can be used by your agency’s chief executive and senior management team to depict a high-level overview of the gaps in your agency's Program .
The higher maturity and capability levels (level 2 - Operational and level 3 - Proactive) in the Detailed Assessment can also be used to help identify future actions required to improve your agency's compliance against individual behaviours.
The chief executive and senior management team can use the identified areas for improvement from the Capability Model report to feed back into their Program and Plan , improving overall compliance with the Standard and their information management maturity and capability.