New horizons and records management

I’ve just been reading the 2009 Horizon Report which explores what emergent technologies are likely to hit the higher education sector over the next few years. It’s a fascinating read for anyone interested in new technologies – and not just those working in HE.

As readers of this blog will know, one of my constant concerns for the records management profession is that we are getting further and further behind ‘the curve’ when it comes to new technology – and thus need to be doing all we can to futurewatch and to consider the implications for our profession.

Here are just a few snippets from the report and a summary of how they might be relevant to records managers…

The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision. Collective intelligence may give rise to multiple answers, all equally correct, to problems. The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are redefining scholarship as we grapple with issues of top-down control and grassroots scholarship

Anyone who has read ‘Managing the Crowd’ will (hopefully) appreciate how this chimes with my own thoughts on how ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ could be used to inform information appraisal.

Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not. Schools are still using materials developed decades ago, but today’s students come to school with very different experiences than those of 20 or 30 years ago, and think and work very differently as well. Institutions need to adapt to current student needs and identify new learning models that are engaging to younger generations.

Today’s students are your workforce in 1-3 years time. So if you think that change will never come to your workplace – think again (a point I made during my keynote at the RMS Conference in 2008)

In countries like Japan, young people equipped with mobiles often see no reason to own personal computers. A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project predicts that by the year 2020, most people across the world will be using a mobile device as their primary means for connecting to the Internet

We need to start ensuring that whatever tools/systems we are designing to manage records are equally at home on a mobile device as they are on a PC or laptop. How many EDRMS work fully and seamlessly on an iPhone I wonder…

And how about the following for examples of technologies which automatically contextualize content (which is, after all, a large part of what records mgt is about). Consider the concepts underpinning these and think what they could mean for information classification in the future…

Applications designed for mobiles can take advantage of built-in features like the microphone and the camera. For instance… Snap-Tell (http://snaptell.com/) use the camera to record a photograph of a CD, video, or book, then identify the artist or author and display that along with reviews of the piece and information on where to buy it...

Devices we commonly carry with us increasingly have the ability to know where they (and, consequently, we) are, and to record our coordinates as we take photographs, talk to friends, or post updates to social networking websites…

Whatever the technology that embeds the capacity for attaching information to an object — and there are many — the result is a connection between a physical object and a rich store of contextual information. Think of doing a web search that reveals not pages of content, but the location, description, and context of actual things in the real world…

Some food for thought for the weekend…

Budget cuts and back office functions

With the economy as it is it will come as no surprise to anybody that tomorrow’s Budget from the UK government looks set to include proposals for spending cuts, reportedly as much as £5bn by 2011.

These will undoubtedly come in many guises and I’m more than happy to leave the economists and political pundits to pick over (and argue over) the details. What Records managers working in the public sector in the UK (and I daresay in other counties similarly affected around the world) should be paying close attention to, however, are the predictions that many of these savings will be made from "efficiency savings" expected to target staff working on "back office" functions rather than frontline services".

As a classic ‘back office function’ records management may well find itself vulnerable – especially as there is so little evidence to demonstrate that what we offer will realise a return on investment and quantifiable, empirical business benefits.

Now you know and I know that there should be more to investing in RM than just the bottom line (accountability, governance, compliance etc) but tighter budgets may well inevitably lead management to raise the risk threshold in such areas to protect ‘frontline services’. After all, one person’s ‘ensuring high standards of corporate accountability’ might well be viewed by another as ‘bureaucratic red tape’.

I’ve repeatedly expressed concern at the lack of evidence out there to demonstrate the impact of RM on organisations – something we are currently looking to address by creating a common framework to enable organisations to measure for themselves.

For our profession’s sake I just hope that this isn’t too late…

University take the (inevitable) next step into the Cloud…

I was very interested to hear from James Lappin’s recent conference report that the University of Westminster has not only outsourced its student email to Google, but its staff email too.

When we were putting the briefing paper together providing guidance for those institutions considering outsourcing their email towards the end of last year all of the examples we could find seemed to be limiting the scope of their projects to student email only – the belief being that doing the same for staff email opened up just too many legal and practical cans of worms. Though I must admit that even back then I was pretty sure that it would only be a matter of time before this changed (even if this was as part of a deliberate 'devils advocate' role – and so it has proved.

I’m sure many other institutions and organisations are going through a similar thought process at the moment – hence our interest here at JISC infoNet in seeking to provide some guidance in this area (as members of the records-management-uk@jiscmail.ac.uk list will be aware). As this development indicates, the challenge will be to provide guidance that is both comprehensive and definitive, but at the same time flexible enough to keep pace with the rapid rate of change. I’ll be discussing this and related challenges with colleagues later this month as we start to plan our approach.