Practicing what we preach

There are not many days where I end up thinking, ‘God, why do I bother’, but today just happens to be one of them.

Few records and information managers would surely disagree that a large part of what we preach to others are:
- managing information appropriately
- providing access to information to only those who require it
- describing information appropriately to facilitate easy resource discovery
- limiting the amount of information being created, circulated and stored to a required minimum

I suspect that even fewer of us would disagree that the number of emails we all receive represent a major burden for us all as users. Indeed, I suspect many of us have produced guidance material or run training events designed to encourage our users to manage email appropriately and broadly in line with the aims I stated above.

So why, in the name of all that is holy, is it that a group of information and records managers seem singularly unable or unwilling to apply these same principles to their own activities?

Those who are not a member of a closed jiscmail list for information and records managers and compliance officers working in the UK FE/HE sectors will not know what I am talking about, but those who are most certainly will!

Here’s how it goes. One of the important functions of the list which has evolved over time is for institutions to check with colleagues whether other institutions have received the same FOI request (so called ‘round robins’ where one person sends a blanket request to a large number of institutions are surprisingly common and it can clearly be useful to know if the request received falls into this category). Now I clearly see the value in this and have no wish to interfere with this function at all. At the same time, the amount of email traffic this generates is quite considerable and usually consists of one person asking ‘has anyone received a request relating to X’ followed by somewhere between a dozen and twenty or more people replying saying ‘received here’ or ‘no, not received here’. Useful for the requestor and those others interested in such things, extremely irritating for those already snowed under by email and who have no need for such information.

After one particularly busy day of such email I suggested applying a little bit of information management to this problem (a radical idea I know). How about we agree a consistent subject heading for such requests? How about the person who originally sends the request uses the prefix ‘Round robin:…..’. Then those who do not wish to receive these emails can simply use the ‘rules’ functionality within their email client to automatically route such messages to their deleted items folder without troubling them. Those that are happy with the status quo and who wish to keep receiving these messages need to nothing at all. It doesn’t even require an action from those who reply to the original message as when they hit reply their message will automatically use the original subject heading containing ‘round robin’.

Not rocket science I know, but simple, unobtrusive and effective.

But not, apparently acceptable to the members of the list who, I believe decided not to adopt this radical step at a meeting last Friday. Now I wasn’t able to attend the meeting so do not know why not. Maybe I have overlooked some fundamental flaw in my reasoning, but if so no one has bothered to tell me what it is. All i do know is that it does rather make one despair about the profession.

Are we really that conservative that we are unable to countenance the concept of such change? Or are we so arrogant that we feel that the rules we seek to apply to others do not apply to us?

Either way such a minor and trivial issue has utterly depressed me on a wet and windy day

The making of a maturity model

Where to start when asked to produce a ‘maturity model’ for records management within the HE/HE sector? Maturity models and other benchmarking tools certainly seem to be popular at the moment in all sorts of areas, especially in relation to ICT. On the plus side they allow an organisation to think objectively and comprehensively about the subject in question. They encourage investigation and reflection and through the picture they paint allow organisations to celebrate their strengths and to address their weaknesses. Maybe it’s no surprise that such approaches are gaining in popularity at a time when budgets are being squeezed as a much clearer idea of spending priorities should emerge as a result of working through such a model. On the minus side I’m always slightly concerned about the terminology and the (unintended) slight which may be felt by those who cannot demonstrate full maturity in a particular area and who might, justifiably, be reluctant to admit to being ‘immature’.

I’m hopeful, however, that the emergence of maturity models for records management is, in itself, evidence of a new phase in the profession’s development. For these are not tools attempting to demonstrate the need for records management or to justify expenditure in it, they assume (rightly or wrongly) that that stage has already passed. No. The maturity model assumes that whatever it is that is being assessed – records management in this instance - is an accepted and valued function of the organisation and that what is required is an assessment of how well it is performing and the impact that it is having. Thus hopefully the very existence of such models are evidence of a new level of maturity for records management as a discipline.
But to return to my opening question: ‘where to start’ when asked to produce one? My first thought was that this is a potentially risky endeavour. After all, in order to assess ‘maturity’ this implies that you have a clear idea of what ‘mature’ records management should look like.

Starting from scratch in this regard seemed especially foolhardy. After all, it would be a pretty bold claim to assume that I alone or even we as a service were in a position to define what this would look like. Getting together a working group or consultation panel would have been another approach and would certainly have increased the chances of producing a more rounded model, but wouldn’t we then be in danger of trying to reinvent the wheel? After all, what we are talking about in terms of this picture of ‘mature’ records management is surely pretty similar to defining a ‘standard’ for records management – and, as we all know, there are plenty of those around already (as someone once said: the great thing about standards is that there are always so many to choose from!). And we certainly didn’t want to try to produce a JISC infoNet standard for RM for people to start comparing with and mapping against 15489 et al.

The most logical approach therefore seemed to be to make use of an existing definition of a mature RM system; one that is current, authoritative and which has been developed collaboratively. And this is where fortune smiled on us by allowing us to combine two parallel, but related agendas. For just at the time we were planning the maturity model so I was part of the working group helping the National Archives to revise the s.46 Code of Practice on records management which accompanies the UK Freedom of Information Act. Not only was this a statement of what RM should look like in a public authority in order to ensure compliance with the legislation which ticked all those boxes mentioned earlier, but was also an initiative that we would want to be supporting for the sector anyway. When the original COP was published JISC produced the Model Action Plan for FE/HE Compliance with the COP. We could have taken a similar approach and produced another sector-specific Model Action Plan for the updated Code but felt that a Maturity Model better reflected the fact that the sector is now nearly a decade further down the line and would better appreciate tools to help assess how they are doing, rather than one which assumes they are still yet to get started!

So although firmly based on the National Archive’s Code of Practice and developed with their knowledge and assistance it should be noted that this Maturity Model was developed separately to it and any mistakes or omissions are very much ours not theirs. It also therefore follows that this Maturity Model is quite specific in its focus and the model of mature records management that it represents – i.e. a model appropriate for UK further and higher education institutions who want to be able to ensure compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. Of course the benefits of achieving such a model should be felt much further and deeper than this and in many more contexts but this remains at its core.

The Maturity Model and guidance for its use are available from today and we look forward to hearing of your experiences in using it. We also hope that as many institutions as possible will submit their completed forms to us to enable us to get an overview of the current maturity of RM within the sector as a whole and thus help inform how we can best tailor our own efforts to continue to support it in the future.

The evolution of an Impact Calculator

It’s a well known truism that it is easier to criticise something than it is to solve it. Certainly anyone who has heard me at any of a number of workshops and conferences over the past year or so ask questions of speakers regarding the evidence base for the ‘facts’ and figures they have quoted citing the alleged benefits to be realised through investing in records management will be aware that I have not shied away from the criticism side of things. Though I should, perhaps, add that these questions have always been asked not to try to trip up or embarrass the speaker concerned, but as part of a genuine attempt to understand whether the numbers concerned -: whether it be regarding how much time senior managers spend looking for information or how many copies of the same document exist in the same organisation - are (as I always hoped) based on sound, empirical evidence or (as I always feared) were as mythical as the ‘Coopers & Lybrand’ study that so many seem to reference. Regrettably, if not unpredictably, it seems as though the latter of these scenarios is more often than not the case – as demonstrated in more rigorous fashion by the literature review we published last month.

But as I said at the outset of this piece, lamenting the lack of any reliable, objective, empirical data demonstrating the quantifiable benefits of investing in records management is one thing. The real question facing us was: what to do about it?

After spending a little time wandering up and down blind alleys investigating (and quickly discounting) a ‘Time and Motion’ based approach to measurement we soon settled on a focus on the process as the basis for measurement. After all, records management is surely only ever a means to an end? We spend resources on it to improve how we run our organisations, to improve the service we offer to our stakeholders, to improve our standards of governance and accountability and to ensure we are legally compliant. Surely if we could find ways of measuring how effective a process is before we improve it and then again after we’ve improved it we should have some means of quantifying the impact we have made. Then take away the costs involved in making the change and an even more illuminating set of results emerge.

But what to measure? After all, if you were to automate a previously paper-based process you might expect to see a reduction in both time taken processing information and the space required to store records. We can’t know what it is that you want to measure so we leave it up to you to define what and how many metrics you want to include: be they square metres of storage space, pounds and pence, staff time or C02 emissions - the choice is yours.

A real turning point in the project came when we started to think about the role of RM in a process improvement. After all, there must be few occasions (if ever) when it can be asserted with confidence that records management alone is responsible for achieving an improvement. Indeed, how would we even define what is ‘records management’ in this context? To take our previous example, the introduction of an electronic workflow system to replace a previously manual process clearly has a strong RM influence but it’s also about a technology change. So should it defined as an improvement caused by a new system or RM or both?

The answer (eventually) was obvious. There would be no arbitrary distinction between what aspects of the process improvement RM was responsible for and which were due to other factors. Nor any attempt to classify what counts as RM in this context and what does not. Again we let the user decide. This wasn’t a question of ducking the issue, it was an acknowledgement that process improvements are complex and multifaceted and that individual organisational drivers may differ markedly. The consequence of this decision has been to develop a tool which not only better reflects the complexity of real life, but also broadens its potential scope enormously. Yes, you can measure the improvements realised as a result of RM according to however you choose to define ‘records management’ but equally you can apply the same focus to whatever other element of process improvement that your organisation happens to be interested in measuring the impact of, be that people, IT, equipment or the combination of them all.

All of a sudden we no longer have a tool which might help fill the current dearth of facts and figures regarding the impact of RM, but also a way of deconstructing and measuring process improvement across the board.

But in some ways the hard work still remains to be done. We are well aware that using the Impact Calculator is not a trivial task. In the spirit of ‘garbage in; garbage out’ you can only get reliable, detailed data out if you are prepared to gather raw data of a similar kind in the first place. That, I’m afraid, is down to you.

We are also happy to acknowledge the Impact Calculator as ‘work in progress’. We’re hopeful of funding some pilots studies within the UK HE sector soon and would be very interested to hear the experiences of all those who make use of the tool, wherever they be, so that we can incorporate any improvements into a Version 2 in the near future
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Finally, I should like to pay credit to my colleague, Joanne, whose statistical skills, sound judgement and commitment to the project have all helped turn my rather sketchy and notional idea of just how such a tool might work into this finished and infinitely superior end product. Nice one.

So do please take the time to download the tool, make use of it and let us know how you get on (if you do post anything online about your experiences we would be grateful if you use the tag ‘impact-calc’ to enable us to track it).

Its available now at www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/impact-calculator

What is Sharepoint for?

From the speakers and discussion at the TFPL 4th Sharepoint Summit I attended in London yesterday the answer to the question in the title seems to be ‘for collaboration but not for records management’. This is hardly breaking news, after all any records manager will happily explain how MOSS falls down as a specialist records management system. But what was more surprising (and potentially worrying) was that people seemed to view collaboration and the kind of controls that records management should provide as two completely different and unrelated beasts entirely.

I’m certain there are no sinister motives for this and that it simply reflects a genuine organisational requirement to be able to share ideas, work creatively in teams and to ensure ready access to the right information – but why are these goals and the functionality used to achieve them thought of as not requiring records management nor of having any records management implications in themselves? Is it really possible to separate the two? Surely all this collaboration is in aid of something, is designed to further the strategic aims of the organisation or to meet a genuine business need? If so, aren’t we straying pretty darn close to records management territory?

And even if we were to ignore the fact that the outputs of most of this collaboration does result in some form of evidence of a business transaction and were, for the sake of argument, to assume that all of this collaboration is in fact the end in itself, then surely this would still require the existence of some RM controls to work effectively (authentication, version control, access control, audit trails etc spring to mind)? Otherwise aren’t we in danger of straying down the information equivalent of ‘sofa government’: all cosy chats over a latte and no accountability. Of course it may be that MOSS does offer most, if not all, of the above as part of its collaborative tools (I’m afraid I’m not enough of a MOSS expert to know), but if so its interesting how nobody present at the event seemed to equate these controls with records management.

Part of the problem here lies, I think, in RM’s image problem. Whereas everyone wants collaboration so no one wants records management. Some may (reluctantly) realise they need it but only in the same way that someone with toothache knows they need (rather than wants) a trip to the dentist. There are undoubtedly many reasons why this is so, ranging from our rather impenetrable terminology through to a decade of pushing a rather negative compliance-based spin on what we have to offer. I suspect it also lies in our failure to demonstrate the relevance of RM to current, live, active records and the information streams and processes that will form them. What the views at the workshop yesterday seemed to confirm was the prevalence of the idea that RM only needs to happen way down the line as a means of dealing with the accumulated backlog. A completely separate process divorced from day to day business functions and the technology they employ. So much for the Records Continuum.

I had hoped that, despite its flaws, Sharepoint represented a way of making real steps towards closing this gap between business processes, information creation and records management but unfortunately I fear this optimism may well have been misguided.

Measuring records management in the 'post-compliance era'

I think few records professionals would argue that their profession has largely been dominated by the compliance agenda over the past decade or so, especially here in the UK with first the Data Protection Act and then FOI. Having compliance based arguments to rely upon was great. After decades of records professionals trying to get the message out that records management was important we now had far more powerful voices (government, regulators, auditors etc) saying the same thing. Okay, so none of these Acts explicitly mandated the need for ‘good records management’ (whatever that may mean) but it was certainly clear from reading the Act and from the guidance that surrounded them that it would be very difficult to demonstrate compliance without it.

This certainly helped simplify the business cases for records management we presented to management: “we have to because the law says so”. It also helped simplify how to sell records management to users: “you have to because the law says so”. Okay, so this is a deliberate over simplification but even so is probably not a million miles wide of the mark. If the number of new records management posts within public authorities over this period is anything to go by we also shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss its effectiveness as a strategy. But we should also be aware of the limitations and risks implicit in an over reliance on any one message – particularly one dominated by legal and regulatory compliance, namely:

• The ‘big stick’ approach rarely results in the kind of positive and constructive buy-in from users that records management requires
• Managers will understandably be reluctant to spend anymore than the bear minimum to ensure compliance
• And may even decide against the bear minimum, preferring to favour instead more ‘positive’ investments – especially if the perceived risk of detection or subsequent punishment appears low.

This is not to say that compliance-based arguments have no place in our professional repertoire as clearly they do (and to a degree that will vary according to the sector and appetite for risk in question; but does serve to remind us that putting all your professional eggs in one basket is always a risky tactic, especially if the basket in question is not necessarily a particularly attractive one in the first place. This would be true in times of economic plenty but becomes even more so in periods of economic downturn where budget cuts mean much harder investment decisions and a necessarily more hard-nosed attitude to risk.

‘Impact’, ‘return on investment’ and ‘business benefit’ are now the order of the day. Organisations need to know not only that they will get ‘bang for their buck’, but also how big the bang will be and for how many bucks. This is not new territory for many records managers, but at the same time it is not necessarily where we are most comfortable – not least because so many of the benefits we have previously prided ourselves on delivering (compliance, maintenance of the ‘corporate memory’ etc) have all been largely ‘intangible’ in nature and therefore, by definition, virtually impossible to measure.

But I doubt there are few records professionals who have not also made claims at some point in their careers of the more tangible benefits to be had: reduced overheads, increased efficiency, more productive use of staff time etc and have found figures to support these claims. Indeed open any industry whitepaper or article in the professional literature and you are likely to come across all manner of statistics confirming how long senior managers waste looking for information or how much time can be saved by digitising your entire physical record collection. But how reliable are such sources? How was the data gathered? Who gathered it and why? (And, indeed, in one or two notable cases – does it even exist??).

If records management is to be able to survive and thrive in difficult economic conditions it is essential that is has confidence in the evidence base supporting the claims that it makes, but is this currently the case? JISC infoNet today launches the first deliverable from its ‘Measuring the Impact of Records Management’ project – a selective literature review which aims to look at the extent of evidence available to support claims of efficiency savings made by the records management. This literature review is the prelude to an ‘Impact Calculator’ to be released in November which will provide a framework for organisations to be able to address these apparent shortcomings for themselves and to establish their own empirical evidence demonstrating the costs and return on investment associated with whatever record or information management initiative they are undertaking. Further information on both is now available from our newly revamped Record & Information Management Portal Page, also launched today, which also provides links to all our other resources in this area.

The findings from the literature review confirm that there is both a growing appetite for and a current shortage of ‘impact evidence’ in relation to records management. Hopefully this project will help address both of these.

Business archives in the press

It was good to see a piece on business archives and the positive contribution that archivists can play within commercial organisations in the Financial Times last week. Hopefully such positive press reminds senior decision makers that the effective management of its records is not just a ‘nice to have’ extra - useful for pulling together exhibitions of attractive curios to help decorate their foyer, but actually represents their company’s ‘corporate memory’ and as such has the potential sharpen its competitive edge and increase its profit margins. Certainly now, more than ever, such messages can only help strengthen the position of the corporate archive and its archivists.

What was, alas, a little more disappointing was not to see any mention within the piece of the vital role that records professionals (archivists and records managers) can play - and are playing - in ensuring the effective, efficient and legally compliant conduct of business operations. Nothing about the business benefits to be gained from knowing what information assets you hold and for introducing measures to ensure that such information is retained for as long as it is required (and no longer); nothing about the risks and costs (legal, financial and environmental) of retaining vast quantities of information for too long; nothing about how we can help tackle the increasingly high profile problems surrounding information security – particularly in relation to personal data or the role we can play in identifying and protecting vital records as part of disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

Of course there are limits to what can be covered within one newspaper article and it is clear that in this particular case the FT’s ‘angle’ was deliberately focused elsewhere. My concern is just that such a piece may still leave the CEO of a relatively young company or one without a rich visual heritage to plunder wondering ‘why is this relevant to me?’ whereas the reality is, of course, that it should be of relevance too all CEOs with an interest in how their business functions.

The lost art of problem solving

A Tweet from @Northumbria_RM caught my eye the other day. It was a quote from a contributor to their AC+erm e-Delphi Study along the lines that “RM is something that should be done not something that can be bought and installed.” Nothing too controversial there you might think, after all its what we records managers always say: ‘no quick fixes’, ‘get the processes and standards right first’, ‘try to install a system on a mess and you just have an expensive mess’ etc etc

But what if we are wrong? What if this conventional wisdom is more a reflection of the nature of most records management technologies than representing a universal truism? Sure it’s a certain recipe for failure to attempt to rollout an EDRMS without having prepared every inch of organizational, procedural and cultural groundwork in advance but maybe that’s because of their nature: their size, the (unrealistic) scale of their ambition and their sheer (over?) complexity. But need it be so? After all, most of the technology which is transforming our organizations and our lives seems to be heading in the other direction. We now live in a widget-led world with people designing simple specific apps to solve very specific problems or achieve very specific end results. Take the recent Apple i-phone advertisements extolling the eclectic range of apps available for download, or the simplicity of something like Twitter.

It seems to me that what our users actually want and that we should be finding ways of providing are simple, specific ‘RM apps’ that can be quickly, cheaply and simply ‘bought and installed’ to solve specific problems. Maybe the underlying problem is that we have spent the last decade looking at the problem from the wrong end of the telescope. We’ve been focusing on trying to fix the entire organization whilst hoping that eventually some of the benefits might trickle down and be felt by the ordinary user; where, with hindsight, we might have been better off working out what the problems were that were holding back individual users and building specific solutions to fix them.

When I first started out in records management in 1996 it seemed to me that records management was about finding creative and practical answers to genuine and specific problems in relation to how people managed their records. We needed a means of coordinating retention actions across multiple systems, so we designed one. We needed a way of maximizing the storage space we had available so we designed a location control module that meet our needs. Now of course the talk is of enterprise-wide solutions and international standards. I have no problem per se with either of these but do wonder if together they have unwittingly led us to a situation where all we have to offer is a homogenized, ‘one-size-fits all’ version of records management where we have little choice but to try to shape our problems around the available solutions and where our only route to success lies in trying (and largely failing) to first achieve organizational and cultural change on a scale which is frankly beyond both our reach and our pay-grade.

So it was with rather envious eyes that I read about the forthcoming Repository Fringe Challenge with a bunch of repository developers fired up to come up with genuine, workable solutions to an actual specific problem that is taxing their user community. This isn’t sitting back and hoping that the standards bodies and vendor community eventually acknowledge the problem and build in functionality to their products that are designed to suit everybody. This is a bunch of enthusiastic guys sat round PCs, thinking the unthinkable and finding cool ways of making it happen and then giving it out to the community to use as they see fit.

It’s a way of working and thinking which records management seems to have lost, and I think we are all the poorer for it.