Coding Goernment Agencies
Government agencies Coding Scheme :
Intruduction :
The ideal condition to arrange government agency documents can be created when the functions and jobs of the agency corresponds to its administrative organizations. In such a condition, each job would have a separate unit that aims at achieving its objectives. Thus the code of the job would be the code of the administrative unit, and accordingly, the code would indicate the duties of the unit and the documents it produces. This is what we should aim at so as to carry out the principle of provenance which in its turn conforms to the principle of specialization, whose adherence to entails the emergence of a unified policy adopted by the agency in dealing with similar issues. The absence of such a unified and uniform policy will result in its staff lacking an objective perception which would lead to:
A – The existence of contradictory documents that result from the several authorities dealing with a single issue. This will also lead to an increase in correspondences and therefore an increase in the amount of documents and administrative costs. The competent authority is a department, section, or division or a specialized person in charge.
B – The emergence of conflict in the work of administrative units regarding the problem which results in their poor effectiveness and the lack of mutual confidence. This will in turn affect the entire government agency.
C – The documents concerning a single issue will not be kept in a single place, especially when a shift to decentralization of storage is adopted, as each administrative unit will keep a record of its outgoing document. This will result in the agency holding incomplete files on several topics, its being unaware of the documents issued concerning such a topic and consequently it will face a difficulty in retrieving such documents.
Introduction:
If jobs in a government agency are similar to each other – as is the case with assisting jobs – then their administrative organization should also be similar in their titles, tasks, procedures, work format and method while the administrative levels would differ depending on the size of the agency. For the competent authority may either be a public administration, a department, or a section, or division, or a specialized person in charge.
Since at present such an organizational structure does not exist, the last resort was to create codes for the jobs. Such codes are more stable than the administrative organization which is subject to change, especially in the developing countries which have not fully developed organizational structures that are based on organizational studies done on practical principles; which in reality is no longer difficult to be achieved in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Therefore, the internal coding process of an agency is undertaken through the following processes:
2/1 assigning codes to the basic jobs of the agency. These were assigned the codes from 1 to 30
2/2 assigning codes to the assisting administrative jobs. These were assigned the codes from 31 to 60
2/3 Assigning codes to the agency branches existing in different areas such as using some codes of the locations and areas in which they exist in accordance with the Areas and Governorates Coding Scheme related to the code of the main agency to which the branch is affiliated.
The Government Agency Coding Scheme
The unified government agency coding scheme aims at giving each government agency a unique code that distinguishes it from other government agencies. To this end, the following practical steps were taken:
a –the names of these government agencies were identified;
b-the names were arranged alphabetically in a list; and each name was assigned a group of codes each consisting of three digits. Also the beginning and the end of the codes of each group were identified;
c-the government agencies falling under each name were sorted out in a list and each government agency was given a unique code consisting of three digits;
d- each government agency was assigned a three-digit code starting from the code (001) to code (300) ,so that the code 037, for instance, was adopted as the code of King Faisal University;
e- Certain codes in the government agencies coding list were left blank in case names of other agencies are added to the list later on;
f-the code of the government agency will be printed on its official printed materials below its name on the upper right hand side of the document as follows:
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Name of the Agency
Code (…)
The working mechanics of the government agency coding scheme
The government agency coding scheme is implemented through the following stages:
1- Coding the government agency's main administrative jobs;
2- Coding the government agency's assisting administrative jobs;
The working mechanics of the government agency coding scheme:
First: The Main Administrative Jobs
The government agency coding scheme aims at achieving the following results:-
1.Assigning each government agency a consistent code, in implementation of the stipulation of Para (2) of article (4) of the documents and archival system so as to distinguish each government agency from other agencies, and consequently distinguishes the documents issued by such an agency from those of other agencies . For instance, code 037 stands for King Faisal University and distinguishes it from other government agencies.
2-Distinguishing an agency's administrative units of main jobs from its administrative units of assisting jobs; thus distinguishing the documents issued by the former from any other documents. This facilitates the process of storing the documents under the same code of the units producing them; thus achieving the principle of provenance which is one of the most important principles of documents and archives storage.
3-Distinguishing the main and various activities of the agency from each other;
4 –distinguishing the various activities of university units from each other;
5–distinguishing branches' work from those of the main agency; and thus distinguishing the documents produced thereof;
Second: The Assisting Administrative Jobs:
The aim of the assisting administrative jobs is to provide assistance to university main jobs in carrying out their tasks. Since the assisting administrative jobs in the government agencies are similar, a single code was assigned to those similar jobs to be used by all government agencies, so that similar documents in all government agencies be stored under such a code. This will help those concerned in the administrative units and document centers to store these codes, identify what they stand for and distinguish the activities of the governmental agencies' main jobs from one another.