In this blog post we asked Stephanie Friesen, second year iSchool student specializing in Archival Studies to tell us about her experience undertaking a Records Management Co-op with Building Operations here on campus.
Co-op student Stephanie Friesen
What are your responsibilities for this Co-op?
I’m involved in two projects with Building Operations. One is the EAD (enterprise active directory) integration project, and the other is a Records Management governance project that includes restructuring their shared drive and producing policy documentation. I’m involved in both projects because they rely each other to be successful. However, at the moment I’ve been focused on the former and will be discussing that in this post.
Who’s involved in this project?
The EAD integration project has members from multiple units including Energy & Water, Infrastructure Development and Building Operations because these units are quite dependent on each other in the services they provide and in the past were one unit and so they have deep connections to each other. This project also has partners in IT and the Records Management Office.
What are the project outcomes?
Put simply, the goal of the project to seamlessly retire the old domain and transition all users to EAD. We expect that Building Operations will discontinue use of the old domain making them able to fully utilize the services offered by EAD. Additionally, Building Operations will migrate all of their relevant data to EAD within a new structure which will make finding information faster and easier for all users. This project is currently finishing up the discovery phase where we’ve been finding all the relevant data that is required for the rest of the project. I’ve been tasked with collecting all of the data related to who the users are, and what hardware they use that may be affected during the migration. This important, but very detailed work. After discovery is complete I will be assisting the team with determining roles and permissions, engaging with the stakeholders, and creating governance and policies for the new system.
What are the challenges you’ve had to face?
I’ve never held a position in information management or as a business analyst before and this has been a challenge for me as I’m being exposed to a lot of new things that I don’t always understand. The support I’ve received from my coworkers at Building Operations and from the Records Management Office has helped immensely. Furthermore, the iSchool has prepared me for this position by teaching me how to think about records and information in a critical, archival way.
Thanks to Stephanie for taking the time to talk about her Co-op experience.