Why the data was collected

Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga | Archives New Zealand (Te Rua Mahara) is responsible for regulating information management (IM) in the public sector, in accordance with the Public Records Act 2005 (PRA). Our remit covers both central and local government. Monitoring is a key regulatory tool for assuring that public sector information is being well-managed. It is critical for maintaining confidence in the quality and stewardship of information, and for empowering public sector organisations to lift their performance. Regular surveys are one of the core mechanisms Te Rua Mahara uses to collect information for monitoring purposes.

The survey collects quantitative and qualitative data about IM practice to help us to:

• form a picture of how well public sector organisations are performing as-a-whole against the requirements of the PRA and good practice IM
• track improvements in organisations’ performance over time
• identify risks, challenges, opportunities and emerging trends affecting IM in organisations, so we can feed this intelligence into responsive regulation
• provide public visibility of organisations’ IM performance.

How the data was collected

The survey covers all central government organisations, referred to by the PRA as ‘public offices’, except for Ministers of the Crown and school boards of trustees. It also covers local authorities (i.e. councils) but excludes council-controlled organisations.

The 2021/22 survey was sent to 226 public sector organisations, including:

• 148 public offices, which were required to respond by direction to report (s31, PRA).
• 78 local authorities, which were invited to respond. A questionnaire was delivered via the online survey tool SurveyMonkey and was open from 30 June to 21 July 2022. Executive Sponsors from organisations in scope were invited to participate and were asked to coordinate their organisation’s response.

How the data was cleaned-up

The published dataset is a modified version of the full dataset extracted from SurveyMonkey. The modifications involved:

• Removal of incomplete and duplicate responses.
• Removal of individual respondents’ names and contact details.
• Numbering of the questions as they appeared in the questionnaire, to facilitate re-use.
• Cleansing of punctuation that was corrupted during export, e.g. macrons.

Changing the annual survey to every two years

Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga | Archives New Zealand reinstated its annual Survey of public sector information management in 2019. Now having completed our fourth consecutive survey we have a baseline of data that shows moderate changes between each year in the state of information management. We can refresh this data less frequently and still get a good longitudinal picture. The survey will therefore change from an annual survey to every two years effective from the beginning of 2023. We will survey the public again in 2024.

The 2021-22 survey report is being released 3 March 2023, and further evaluation findings will be shared later in the year. You can also read some of what we’ve found to date in the Report on the State of Government Recordkeeping 2021/22 (archives.govt.nz) that was released at the end of 2022.

We thank you for your participation and feedback over the past years and look forward to working with you in 2024.