Its been a recurring theme of mine for the last couple of
years now that records management needs to find better ways of connecting with
users; of thinking a little less about ‘the organisation’ and a little more
about ‘the individual’. For without the
support and enthusiasm of those on the ground even the most ambitious and
robust of RM implementations is pretty well doomed to failure.
Human Computer Interaction and User Centred Design based
approaches certainly have a great deal of potential in this regard and the more
I have researched these areas the more convinced I become that we need to find
ways to bring such techniques more fully into the RM canon. It would certainly be interesting to know
just how many EDRM/ERM systems have ever undergone any robust, independent
usability testing. The change in tack
from some vendors away from the “our product integrates ‘seamlessly’ with your
users desktop” message of the past to the “our product integrates seamlessly with
Sharepoint so your users never even know its there” message of today suggests a
certain recognition that this was largely a battle lost.
I suspect many of those involved in RM projects might
protest that user consultation and engagement has been an important facet of
their projects. Focus groups, ‘model
offices’, and user representatives on project teams are all well established
mechanisms for ensuring the user voice isn’t lost. But how effective are they? Are these channels which really proactively
encourage free thought and honest reflection, or are they (perhaps
subconsciously) designed to only produce a narrow range of responses with most
of the important decisions already made: more a question of ‘Which user
interface do you like best: A, B, or C’ than ‘What could we do to improve your access
to the information you need to do your job more easily’? Whereas the former already assumes a new
interface is needed, whether the user likes it or not; the latter makes no such
assumptions and could elicit a broad spectrum of ideas that go far beyond
changes to a system interface.
As part of my role at JISC infoNet I’ve been increasingly
engaged with participatory techniques and stringing these together to run
participatory workshops. These are
simple, creative exercises that are designed to get groups of people working
together, raising issues, sharing ideas and forming a consensus. They are the polar opposite of most of the
workshops I’ve ever encountered in terms of the energy and enthusiasm they
generate and the results they generate.
Just this week we’ve released an online guide to how to conduct such an
event through our Planning a participatory workshop infoKit.
We’ve been using these techniques extensively with project
teams, College leadership teams and internally within our own team for over a
year now and I increasingly think they have an important role to play as part
of any information or records related project.
Of course, just getting running a participatory workshop or two or
livening up a meeting with some of these exercises alone isn’t going to
guarantee a successful RM project, but it might just represent one of the
pieces of the records management puzzle that I’m increasingly convinced is
missing at the moment.
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