Standards Development

Scope

This document specifies additional competence requirements for personnel involved in the audit and certification process for management systems for records (ISO 30301:2019 – Information and documentation – Management systems for records – Requirements) and complements the existing requirements of ISO/IEC 17021-1.

The proposed deliverable is new part of ISO 17021, to be developed by ISO TC46/SC11 and CASCO.

Purpose

Purpose and justification of the proposal

Records are created and maintained in the conduct of business activities. Records are both evidence of business activity and information assets. Effective management of information assets enables organizations to capitalize on the value of their information resources as strategic assets, and to help them make the right managerial decisions, in response to the challenges of the global and digital environment. More than half of the information retained by the modern organization is unstructured information which has forms of records or documented information. In particular, the competitiveness of the organization would be enhanced by integrating the latest data technologies such as big data analytics and systematic management of records or documented information. From this point of view, an effective management system for records (MSR) might be a key factor in the organization's success.

The audit and competence of auditors to determine whether an organization's established MSR is effectively operating effectively in accordance with ISO 30301 (reflecting international best practice), have an impact on the key factors of the organization's success. Proper establishment of professional records management knowledge and skills that qualified MSR auditors should possess is the most basic cornerstone of this work.

From this point of view, guidance on the competence of auditors in the field of record management systems along with other management systems was presented in the Annex A of ISO 19011 in 2011. Since then, various other management fields, including quality management, environmental management, and information security management, have established new standards for their auditor competence requirements as follow-up parts to the newly issued ISO 17021-1, and this time we intend to establish standards for competence requirements for auditors of record management.

The increase in the number of certificates issued has been slow since ISO 30301 was issued in 2011. However, now that more than 30 certificates have been issued worldwide and related auditor training and certification courses have been provided, it is time to develop standards for auditor competence requirements for MSR.

There are still not many certificates issued, but now is the right time to develop standards for training properly certified auditors so that the management system for records can be expertly audited from now on

In particular, MSR has the functions to support the management of documented information of that all management system standards must have, so any management system standard can establish an integrated system with an MSR. When integrated, we can expect more professional and systematic utilization of documented information, which in turn can increase the synergetic effect of the overall ISO management system. In this sense, it is necessary to establish competence standards for certified auditors not only for the MSR certification itself but also for the integrated management systems audits.

Consider the following:

Is there a verified market need for the proposal?

What problem does this document solve?

What value will the document bring to end-users?

See Annex C of the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 1 for more information.

See the following guidance on justification statements in the brochure ‘Guidance on New work’: https: //www.iso.org/publication/PUB100438.html