What the Executive Sponsor and Business Owner need to know about IAR: the obligations you carry, the evidence gap most registers leave open, and what a working register gives you.
The obligation is yours. The evidence to meet it usually isn't there when you need it.
The Public Records Act 2005 and mandatory standard 16/S1 require named accountabilities at the executive level. Your register should reflect them. Most registers don't.
When a Minister, Ombudsman, or auditor asks what your organisation holds, the honest answer is often "we're not sure." The register is a spreadsheet, built for a moment that has passed.
Staff turnover takes institutional knowledge with it. When the person who built the register moves on, you inherit a historical document, not a working tool.
Disposal sits in the too-hard basket. Holdings grow unchecked because mapping to the disposal authority by hand is slow, and the risk of getting it wrong feels higher than the risk of not acting.
IAR is designed around the accountability structure 16/S1 requires. Business owners and executive sponsors have their own role-scoped views. Stewardship is tied to organisational positions rather than named individuals, so accountability survives the staff changes that routinely hollow out spreadsheet-based registers.
It is not an EDRMS or a records management system. IAR holds the metadata that governs your holdings, not the records themselves. That means it sits above all your content systems and governs across all of them, without replacing any of them.
IAR gives every role the view they need, without access to the detail that isn't theirs to manage. The Executive Sponsor and Business Owner each have their own screen, aligned to the accountability 16/S1 assigns them.
Overall IMMA maturity score, coverage rate, and open improvement actions across the whole organisation. The evidence base for governance reporting, without digging through the detail or waiting for a report to be assembled.
What proportion of your holdings are classified and disposal-ready, and where the gaps sit. The answer to "could we defend a disposal decision today?" available any time an auditor or regulator asks it.
Coverage and stewardship status across the business area you're accountable for under 16/S1. You can see what your stewards are managing and where issues are open, without running a separate process or chasing a spreadsheet.
Stewardship is linked to organisational positions, not to people. When someone moves on, the accountability stays in place. You don't rebuild the register from scratch each time the team changes.
Organisations that delay a structured register are not avoiding cost; they are deferring it. Here is what accumulates while the register stays as a spreadsheet.
Every asset that should have been disposed of but wasn't is still yours to secure, maintain, and explain. The longer the delay, the larger the liability you carry into the next audit cycle.
A Minister's enquiry or OIA request that touches your information holdings will surface the gap between your obligations and your register quickly. A working register is your first line of defence.
The next time a key IM person moves on, the new person inherits an out-of-date spreadsheet and starts from scratch. IAR makes the handover a structured onboarding, not a rebuild.
Without a living register, IMMA improvement is aspirational. With one, targets are set against real data and improvement actions are tracked to completion, so the next assessment reflects what you have actually done.
We do the heavy lifting of setup. Your team starts from a complete, working picture, not an empty form.
A discussion with your IM lead and the IAR team about your current register, disposal authority, and what you are trying to solve.
We show IAR against your disposal authority and a slice of your existing register, so you can judge it on your own information, not a demo dataset.
We load your authority, migrate your existing register, and onboard your stewards. Your organisation is working in a live, structured register within weeks.
Supply your disposal authority and we will show you what the working register looks like with assets and classes you already understand.