Records management futurewatch

The behaviour of the crowd: a new era for appraisal?

2011-12-08T11:21:00.001Z

Very interesting to see that the folks in charge of the UK Web Archive at the British Library are planning to adopt a crowd-sourcing approach to informing their selection of websites to archive

When I wrote Managing the Crowd back in 2008 I put forward the view that agreeing appraisal decisions largely on the basis of user opinion of the worth of a record was likely to be the only way to go. Here we not only see an example of this being attempted in practice, but an interesting explanation for the decision:

“we recognise that this manual selection process can sometimes be time consuming for frequent selectors. It’s also inevitably subjective, reflecting the interests of a relatively small number of selectors.”

This reflects two of the major tensions informing my own thinking on this back then (and now). That is that the kind of manual approaches to selection and appraisal traditionally adopted, ie manual processes undertaken by a relatively small number of trained professionals simply isn’t sustainable in the face of the ever growing onslaught of information being created. This will come as no surprise as an issue to any information professional even if solutions to it – this initiative aside - still seem rather thinner on the ground…

The admission of subjectivity within existing approaches to appraisal and the implication of ‘selection bias’ that underlies it is less widely discussed, perhaps because until now we’ve had no alternative. It stands to reason that despite our best efforts any selective appraisal process must inevitably be biased in some way, whether the appraiser is conscious of it or not. But having appraisal decisions based at least in part on user behaviour promises to go along way to resolving some of these issues. What would of course be fascinating would be a comparative study which compares the websites which would have been selected for capture by existing manual methods with those that are captured by the Web Archive according to ‘the crowd’ to go some way to seeing how closely (or not) the two are aligned.

A counter argument to all this may run along the lines of ‘but what if the sites the public are viewing most are not the most important ones.’ In short: ‘do the public really know best?’ Perhaps wisely the British Library are also incorporating “curatorial input to this approach, so we’ll be asking curators from the Library to assess the quality and relevance of resulting selections”. But it does pose and interesting question: should we be seeking to capture as accurately as possible the sites which the public believed to be of interest/use to a particular topic or those that we as information professionals believe they should have been interested in? The former of these may lead to the capture of some surprising, perhaps even ‘unsuitable’ sites, whilst the latter would perhaps provide a more informed, maybe a more ‘official’ version of events. But which would be the most accurate?

Its also interesting to note that this approach to crowd-sourcing isn’t just relying on user opinion but on the results of actual user behaviour. They aren’t just asking people to collectively vote for sites they wish to see included in the archive, but are analysing data from twitter regarding which sites were linked to at the time. Using user behaviour to inform appraisal wasn’t something I considered back in 2008 but have done quite of thinking about since, notably in a paper in the Records Management Journal in 2009 (Vol 19 No.2) titled ‘Forget electronic records management, its automated records management that we desperately need’. That is that we use the data about user behaviour generated by business systems (which records they have opened, whether they edited or just read it, what they looked at next etc) as the means to help inform our records management policies based not on what we believe to be organisational need, but on actual patterns of behaviour. This is something we are all familiar with through sites such as Amazon and their ‘users who looked at this item also looked at these items…’ functionality. Use of such ‘behavioural analytics’ is also gathering momentum within academia with institutions for example using library usage patterns to identify at an early stage which students may be disengaging from their studies. To my mind the ability to closely monitor and analyse user behaviour in this way has the potential to not only increase the scalability of much of records management but also to increase the level of sophistication in which it can operate.

Maybe there is hope yet.

The storage addiction

2011-09-01T10:42:00.000+01:00

The link between a story about people's apparent addiction to paying to store old sofas, records, magazines that they no longer have room for at home and a critique of email management strategies over the past 15 years or so is not, perhaps, immediately obvious. And yet I was certainly struck by many of the same underlying trends that I alluded to in a recent paper I gave to the Digital Preservation Coalition's Email Preservation Workshop entitled: Email management: Fifteen wasted years and counting and the the piece featured on today's BBC website about 'The self storage craze'

If you can't be bothered to read the full text of my paper then Chris Prom has neatly summed up the main thrust of my argument in his own blog post. Basically, it is that our users are now strongly influenced in their approach to information management by the external tide of technology which leads them to expect near-infinite storage at their finger tips as a given. Our users like to keep 'stuff'. They may not always know why, or for what purpose it is being kept but want to keep it nonetheless and this apparently applies just as much to battered old bits of furniture and betamax videos we can no longer play as it does to emails and other records.

What I argued in the paper to the DPC was that we as records professionals seem to have either ignored or dismissed this impetus and have spent the best part of fifteen years trying, virtually always unsuccessfully, to fight against it and to impose rules regarding the retention and disposal of emails and other records which not only runs counter to the overall direction of technological development but to human nature. As i say in the paper:

"Trying to sell the concept of manual disposal of emails is a bit like telling the driver of a Porsche that he still has to have a man with a red flag walk in front of him."

This appears to me to be another example, perhaps the classic example of how we have failed to understand how our users think and act and have instead tried to impose management solutions on them which may suit the corporate agenda but which singularly fails to meet user requirements. And then we wonder why users fail to engage with the solutions we provide...

All this is very dear to my heart at the moment as I am currently working on producing a new infoKit for the JISC infoNet website: "Implementing information management technologies" which aims to fuse records management and Human-Computer Interaction approaches to create a methodology for implementing information managment techologies which gives equal weight to meeting the needs of the users as it does to the organisation. I doubt it will be the complete answer, but at least it will hopefully mark a step in the right direction. It won't be released until early next year so watch this space...

Paying lip service to the user

2011-06-09T11:28:00.001+01:00

Since my last post on the need to rebalance our approach to records management around the needs of the user I have been doing a little research of the RM literature on the subject. Admittedly this has been confined to the Records Management Journal (as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board I have easy access to it!) but looking through the back issues of 20 years for articles relating to RM system implementation has still proved an interesting exercise. I guess I should say at the outset (if not already obvious) that this was no formal literature review, but it at least helped contextualise some of my own thoughts, observations and anecdotatal evidence.

I found 7 papers relating to RM system implementation; most, if not all, it has to be said, relating specifically to EDRMS and I guess this focus has to be borne in mind when making any generalised assumptions. But that aside they nearly all make the point that ‘user buy-in’ is critical to the success of the project and that projects are largely doomed to failure without it.

There is also a remarkable consistency regarding how this can best be achieved: ‘Involve users early’, ‘’invite user representatives onto the project board’, ‘invite user representatives to try it out in a model office’, ‘give users plenty of training and support’ etc etc. All perfectly sound advice you might think and indeed it’s difficult to argue against any of them but at the same time I can’t shake the feeling that despite all these good intentions they are all missing the real point.

It’s a little like we are saying ‘when forcing a pedestrian to learn to drive a car its important to include them in the decision making process from the beginning; invite them to help choose what make and model; let them decide the colour; be sure to offer them plenty of training first and then be prepared to sit with them during their first few trips’. Great. But what if they didn’t actually want to drive a car in the first place? What if walking or taking the bus really suits their lifestyle? In short rather than simply asking them what colour car they would like, why not ask them how we could best improve their journey to work, however they decide to make it?

Biagio and Ibricu (RMJ Vol 18 No.3) inadvertently made an interesting point when they stated:

“users often fail to understand the corporate perspective of an EDRMS implementation and tend to remain focused on how the system will help them perform their jobs more efficiently and which tangible benefits and improvements it will bring”

Is it me, or do I detect a note of criticism of the user’s values here? Almost as if being censured for daring to put how they perform their own roles above what is of benefit to the organisation and its records managers. Well, welcome to the real world. Of course users are going to put their own working practice and working lives first. You’d have to be a pretty strange beast to volunteer to make your own work less efficient and less enjoyable just so someone else can benefit.

This question of just who the EDRMS is for also rears its head in another article by Ganesh Vednere (RMJ Vol 19, No.2) when he states:

“some people have been known to say ‘oh we are not that familiar with the technologies, so we let the technology team do the selection for us’ – well, that’s fine, but remember that ultimately it is the records management team that has to live with the platform”.

Now Ganesh was making a different point here about the need for records managers to get involved in the technical selection process rather than just delegating it to IT but what is striking here is the overt assumption that is the ‘records management team’ who have to live with the consequences of a poorly chosen system. A fair enough point, but what about the poor users? They don’t even get a mention. Doesn’t the same logic apply to them as well? Aren’t we asking them to ‘live with a platform’ that in all likelihood they had little or no input into choosing and configuring?

So my point? That the literature is absolutely right to highlight the importance of user engagement but that they seem to be fundamentally misjudging when in the process this needs to occur and the weight that needs to be placed upon their feelings. And that this process can probably best be started by replacing the question ‘how can we configure this system to try to meet your requirements? With ‘how can we help you do your job better?’

Its the user, stupid

2011-05-23T15:24:00.003+01:00

Take a look through ISO-15489 and see how many of its requirements are directed at meeting the needs of ‘the user’. Now I’d hesitate to say “none” as its quite possible that I’ve overlooked one or two, but I think I’m pretty safe in suggesting “precious few” as an accurate answer. Reading through it soon becomes clear who records management’s primary stakeholder is assumed to be – and its clearly not the user with virtually every recommendation defined in terms of what “the organisation” requires and what is in “the organisations” best interests.

This probably doesn’t come as a great surprise, after all RM has long strived to be acknowledged as an established ‘corporate function’ with an enterprise-wide remit. Indeed all the benefits that RM can offer as stated in Part 1 of 15489 are described by the way in which they “enable organisations to…”.

Most RM technologies follow this lead and seek to deliver benefits to ‘the organisation’. But where does this leave the individual users of which the organisation is comprised? Can we automatically assume that what is in the best interests of the organisation will also be so for its staff? Taken to its logical conclusion the answer must inevitably be yes; after all the organisation that fails to make a profit or continually finds itself in the law courts will soon find itself unable to pay the salaries of its present staff or the pensions of its former. But how strong a connection is this really seen by many? Might it be that the vast majority of staff simply wants to turn up in the morning, complete their allotted tasks as quickly and easily as possible and leave at a reasonable time in the evening with as few complications and hurdles as possible?

Few record managers have the authority to compel users to adopt the procedures or systems they introduce. Instead we rely on a mixture of inspiration and perspiration to encourage adoption – with varying degrees of success. My review of the existing literature is still in progress but from what I have read so far a recurring theme when it comes to RM system implementation failures is lack of staff engagement. As Rachel Maguire stated in her ‘Lessons learnt from implementing an electronic records management system’ (Records Management Journal, Vol 15 No.3, pp.150-7)

“In spite of extensive training, most staff never got to grips with the system”

From the literature and anecdotal evidence this seems a common occurrence, but why should it be so? Is it that the solutions we offer simply don’t meet the requirements of our users? Do we even know what their requirements are? Or have we been guilty of paying lip-service to such considerations whilst instead focusing our attention of trying to deliver solutions which benefit the organisation entire but at the users’ expense?

Outside of the RM sphere disciplines such as HCI (Human-computer interaction) and User Centered Design are well established and important aspects of the design and implementation of IT systems and technologies and help to deliver devices and applications that users actively want to use, partially because they have had a very real and active role in the design process and because this has led to solutions that make their lives a little bit easier. Myself and Jay Vidyarthi (a Human-Computer Interaction specialist from Canada) wrote a paper for the Records Management Journal (Human-computer interaction: the missing piece of the records management puzzle?, RMJ, Vol. 20 No.3, 2010) looking into some of these very issues but inevitably that only scratched the surface.

Now as part of my role at JISC infoNet I am hoping to build on this work by producing a resource which seeks to redress this balance and to find ways of integrating aspects of HCI and User Centred Design into the design and implementation of information management technologies. As such I would be really grateful to hear of any examples that you know of or have been involved with of information or records management projects which may have explored any of these issues and sought to apply these principles; or (perhaps more likely) to hear of projects which have stumbled or failed due at least in part to failings in this area.

Of course none of this is meant to suggest that ‘the organisation’ doesn’t matter, or that we should lose sight of the bigger picture whilst attempting to solve the specific problems of every member of staff – but merely to recognise that without the genuine and positive engagement of the latter we will never truly be able to serve the interests of the former.

Calculating the impact of the Impact Calculator

2011-04-18T11:44:00.003+01:00

Back in October 2009 I posted on the launch of our new Impact Calculator, a tool designed to address the worrying dearth of reliable evidence supporting the various claims that are often made in favour of investment in records management (‘increasing productivity’, decreasing overheads etc’). Well, here we are, 18 months, 270 registered downloads (and lots more unregistered) of the Impact Calculator, 6 completed pilot projects and 1 published research paper later.

Hopefully, the paper in question – based on the findings from 6 UK universities all of whom used the Impact Calculator to measure the return on investment (or not) realised through improvements to records management – within the Records Management Journal (Vol. 21 No.1, 2011) will finally drive a stake in the heart of that oft-quoted but seemingly completely mythical previous ‘source’ of ‘data’: “the Coopers & Lybrand study” which has been doing the rounds of lazy records management presenters and authors for about the past decade!

Of course data based solely on the experience of 6 universities is always going to be limited in terms of its broader applicability and the evidential weight we can place upon it, but at least their methodology and the workings of the calculator are transparent and consistent and therefore a considerable step forward on what has gone before.

And the conclusions from this work? Well, there are several and its difficult to summarise them adequately in a blog post, but the following statements all feature in my RMJ paper’s conclusion:

- There is no single absolute threshold of data purity and evidential rigour appropriate when measuring the impact of records management
- the cost effectiveness of records management is closely linked to questions of volume
- measuring impact represents a challenging new role for records professionals
- There are pros and cons to judging the impact of records management in terms of the tangible benefits realised

And the following statements, also based on the outputs from the same pilot projects have also featured in presentations on the Impact Calculator that I have given to post-graduate students at both University of Aberystwyth and San Jose University, California:
- retrospective appraisal projects rarely deliver a financial return on investment
- implementing a retention schedule ‘from this point on’ can deliver cost savings
- RM is only cost effective above a certain scale of operation
- investment in better processes and systems is more cost effective than increased reliance on cheaper labour

Although the full text of my RMJ paper is only available via the Records Management Journal from Emerald Publishing, the full results of the 6 pilot projects with commentary is publicly available from the JISC infoNet website.

As noted above, the jury is still out as to whether seeking to measure the impact of records management purely in statistical terms is a good thing or not and certainly there are lots of other reasons (legal, regulatory, historical etc) as to why it makes sense to appraise legacy records even if the evidence suggests that it will never recoup the money you spend on doing it. But at least now there is a tool and the beginnings of an evidence base out there for those who do feel that the business case for investment in records management within their organisation would be strengthened through the addition of some relevant and reliable data regarding its financial worth.

Records management: the plasterer's hammer?

2010-12-06T14:44:00.001Z

“For a field largely reliant on the active participation of the individual users responsible for creating, using and managing records to achieve its aims, much of records management appears sorely lacking in the depth and sophistication of its knowledge about those same user s, their needs and objectives”.

So begins the conclusion of the paper written by myself and Jay Vidyarthi and published in the latest volume of the Records Management Journal. (Vol 20, No 3)

The paper discusses the way in which records management has focused almost exclusively and to the exclusion of virtually all other considerations on the needs of ‘the organisation’ often to the detriment of the users we are so reliant upon. Records management is a discipline which strives for standardisation, consistency and uniformity; for example in the form of functional classification schemes attempting to map activities across the entire organisation with a view to constructing a ‘corporate file plan’ or shared metadata schemas. This drive to standardisation isn’t just evident within organisations, but across them – be it in the guise of ISO 15489 or any of the specification standards for an EDRMS – all of which have at their heart the desired goal of uniformity of approach.

Read any section of 15489 and it’s abundantly clear who the main beneficiary of records management is intended to be – and its not the user. Virtually every section defines its objectives in terms of the benefits it will provide to ‘the organization’ with the user(s) getting barely a mention. Now none of this may strike the user as particularly surprising, nor in any way negative. After all, records management has long strived to be acknowledged as a ‘corporate function’ alongside HR, finance etc and clearly many of the drivers for it (accountability, governance, regulation etc) tend to apply at the organisational, rather than the individual level.

None of this is intended to criticise, but to shed some light on why it is that records management often struggles to satisfy the requirements of the individual users it relies on for success and why it could be argued that it has given up even trying. At its most extreme this disparity between the design of many records management systems and the needs of the individual user is most succinctly summed up in a quote made by one EDRMS user to me once that ‘making me use an EDRMS is like asking a plasterer to use a hammer’!

This clearly puts records management and the technology we rely on to implement it (whatever that technology may be) in something of a quandary. Is it really possible for it to successfully serve two equally demanding masters? Can we really hope to find ways of meeting the myriad, highly specific, highly personal demands of our user community in a way which not only pleases each individual user but also in a way which continues to meet the obligations and interests of the organisation as a whole?

Carry on as we are and I fear the answer will continue to be ‘no’; but open our eyes and ears to some radical new perspectives and it could yet be a ‘yes’. Human-Computer Interaction, or HCI is a combination of computer science, cognitive psychology, sociology, information science and design which might just represent the ‘missing piece of the puzzle’. A blog post doesn’t provide the space to explore the detail – that’ what Jay and I start to do in the RMJ paper. Here it suffices to describe it as a structured approach which puts the users first to ensure that they can interact with the system in ways which meet their needs whilst also continuing to meet the needs of the organisation. By shining a light on the behaviour, needs, opinions, tendencies and motivations of end-users it’s the first step towards achieving truly effective records management systems. After all, give somebody a tool that patently saves them time, energy and frustration and they would be foolish not to embrace it; but so too we must acknowledge that the reverse is true and that to try to make somebody use a tool that promises to only help someone (or something) else but at their own personal expense and surely we must concede that they would be a fool to use it.

The implications of such a shift in emphasis are profound, for records management as traditionally conceived is a house built from the top down determined by the needs of the organisation, and not one built from the bottom up based on the needs of its users. But it also offers some tantalising prospects: not just RM systems that users actively want to engage with, but also the possibility that we could start to use this new found knowledge of user behaviour to design and create records management systems that can actually manage records ‘automatically’ (at least in part) based on this behaviour – in a way similar to that used by Amazon et al to organise their content to aid the user experience. Desirable? Definitely. Possible? Who knows, but what this space…

Is the Cloud aware that it has 'the future of digital archiving in its hands'?

2010-08-25T11:08:00.003+01:00

As anyone in the audience at the ECA conference in Geneva earlier this year will be aware, one of issues which I’ve been mulling over in recent months relates to roles and responsibilities in ‘the cloud’. The question I was asked to address in Switzerland was ‘in whose hands does the future of digital preservation lie?’ and my succinct response was: ‘Google's’. This was (for reasons evident in the paper I gave) meant both literally – given their increasing dominance of the cloud space but also metaphorically, as an encapsulation of all cloud service providers.

And certainly when my colleague, Doug Belshaw, pointed me in the direction of this post regarding Facebook’s archiving policy it became clear that I’m not the only one thinking about the (unintended?) consequences for all parties of where this might lead us.

Its tempting to see things only from our (by that I mean the archival community) side of the fence – to lament the inevitable decline in our future professional role that the handing over of content to commercial external service providers for its long term preservation will entail and to worry about what it may mean for the archives (and their users) of the future.

But maybe we should also pause to reflect on what it may mean for these service providers themselves and whether they actually have as much concern about the implications of this new found responsibility on their side as we do on ours.

For as I concluded my paper in Geneva:

"Perhaps we should actually stop to ask Google and their peers whether they are indeed aware of the fact that the future of digital preservation lies in their hands and the responsibilities which comes with it and whether this is a role they are happy to fulfil. For perhaps just as we are in danger of sleepwalking our way into a situation where we have let this responsibility slip through our fingers, so they might be equally guilty of unwittingly finding it has landed in theirs.

If so, might this provide the opportunity for dialogue between the archival professions and cloud based service providers and in doing so, the opportunity for us to influence (and perhaps even still directly manage) the preservation of digital archives long into the future".

To again quote from the conclusion of my paper:

"Maybe the interconnection of content creation and use and its long term preservation need not be as indivisible within the cloud as it might first appear. Yes Google’s appetite for content might appear insatiable, but that does not necessarily mean that they wish to hold it all themselves – after all, their core business of search does not require them to hold themselves every web page they index, merely to have the means to crawl it and to return the results to the user. Might we be able to persuade them that the same logic should also apply to the contents of Google Apps, Blogger, YouTube and the like? If so, might the door be open for us, the archival community through the publicly funded purse to create and maintain our own meta-repository within which online content can be transferred, or just copied, for controlled, managed long term storage whilst continuing to provide access to it to the services and companies from which it originated?

That way they get to continue to accrue the benefit of allowing their users to access and manipulate digital content in ways which benefit their bottom line, the user continues to enjoy the services they have grown accustomed to and the archival community can sleep soundly, safe in the knowledge that whilst service providers are free to do what they want with live content, its long term preservation and safety continues to lie in our own experienced and trusted hands".

I wonder if such dialogue is already occurring between Google, Facebook et al and the likes of NARA, NAA and TNA. Lets hope so…

Wisdom of the citizen?

2010-07-01T15:08:00.003+01:00

Very interesting to see the new government initiative launched today by Nick Clegg which calls on the public to help decide which laws they want scrapped.

Now I should point out from the beginning that I'm not passing any political judgement here on its relative merit. What interested me was how the proposal reflects the whole 'wisdom of the crowd' ethos which as many of you will know I have long been advocating as a model for ensuring records management.

The idea is explained more fully in the Daily Telegraph and elsewhere, but in summary (and to quote from Nick Clegg)

"Today we are taking an unprecedented step. Based on the belief that it is people, not policy makers, who know best, we are asking the people of Britain to tell us how you want to see your freedom restored"

Certainly echoes there of my belief that the creators and users of records are often far better placed than Records Managers to understand their records and how we should be looking for innovative ways of extracting this knowledge and using it for management purposes.

And how is this to be done? To quote from Nick Clegg again:

"We are calling on you for your ideas on how to protect our hard-won liberties and repeal unnecessary laws... we're hoping for virtual mailbags full of suggestions. Every single one will be read, with the best put to Parliament"

Again, interesting to see an example of how technology can now be employed to gather and quantify information from a large cross-section of interested people and then used to inform the deliberations of those whose formal role it is to make such decisions.

Now whether this is just political gimmick or a genuine attempt at change is not for me to comment on. But as a high profile example of how technology now has the potential to empower individuals (be they 'citizens' or 'users') and how decision makers can and should now make use of such decision does seem worthy of comment.

Is digital preservation now routine?

2010-05-02T20:24:00.002+01:00

It’s been a while since I attended a conference specifically themed around digital preservation / electronic archiving and having spent a few days last week in Geneva at the excellent European Conference on Archiving I was struck by the change. Not many years ago such conferences were dominated by debate about the technical complexities it posed, about the relative merits of competing theoretical approaches such as emulation and migration and the risks we faced if and when we got it wrong. The fragility of digital media was stressed and compared unfavourably to the durability of their traditional counterparts (encapsulated by seemingly endless comparisons between the original Domesday Book and its 1980s electronic equivalent).

I heard none of this at ECA, at least not in the sessions I attended or the conversations I was party to. Instead there were plenty of case studies from around Europe of organisations who are quietly and successfully getting on with it. On the evidence of the past few days we seem to have found ourselves in the situation where our ability to actually preserve this stuff indefinitely and to continue to provide access to it seems, without much triumph or fanfare to now be taken as read. This is not, of course, the same as saying that no more problems or challenges exist, but they seem to be of a more prosaic, ‘routine’ nature revolving around the need to secure budgets and improve the user experience etc.

More interestingly still if a single concern dominating the conference can be identified it seemed to be one related to the volume of information being created and stored today and estimated to be created tomorrow. I lost count of the number of presentations which contained jaw-dropping predictions of the amount of data soon to be at our fingertips and the challenges this will pose in terms of resource discovery, legal discovery and overall management. But interestingly virtually never its preservation. So, based on the evidence of this conference alone, it seems as though within a few short years we have jumped from a situation where we used to worry obsessively that we were in danger of losing everything to one where we now stress about how to manage a world where we will lose nothing, with barely a pause for reflection on this change.

My other observation was that (my own meagre contribution to one side) there was little or no discussion about the growing impact of the web as a storage ‘repository’ as heralded by the rise of ‘the cloud’. The unspoken assumption behind most of the debate and the projects and initiatives they represented seemed to be that these organisations will always have physical control of the electronic information they wish to preserve both prior to and after its ingest into their electronic archive, but as I tried to stress in my paper, I wonder how safe an assumption that will prove to be?

'Big data': big potential, big challenges

2010-03-05T15:28:00.002Z

This week’s Economist has an excellent special report on managing information entitled ‘Data, Data everywhere’. It looks at the changes, opportunities and challenges posed by our new found ability to create and manipulate vast quantities of data – big data. There are lots of impressive/daunting (depending on your point of view) statistics about just how much data we are now talking about (40 billion photos on Facebook for example) during this “industrial revolution of data”. It also explores the concept of ‘data exhaust’ the trail of clicks which users leave behind them and which Google and others have been able to put to such incredible use: from search to speech recognition and from spell checking to language translation. All made possible not by attempting to training computers the rules which determine how these concepts work, but instead by tracking the activities of billions of user transactions which do the work of refining, correcting and adding relative value to words. Those who have heard my ‘Meet the future of Records Management: Amazon.com’ conference paper will know that I have long suspected that we could and should be making use of this exact same ‘exhaust’ to help us manage information, as well as profit from it - what I describe as 'Automated Records Management' (See also Records Management Journal Vol 19 No.2 2009 for a paper I wrote on this entitled 'Forget Electronic Records Management its Automated Records management that we desperately need')

There’s also interesting stuff in the Economist supplement on the problems of how to make sense of all this data, including new ways of visualising it and the prediction that statistics will soon be one of the coolest jobs around(!). It also makes some interesting points about the need for management to be trained in how to make sense of all this data. This chimes with a conversation I had with a Chief Exec a few weeks ago who also made the case for ensuring that senior management were aware of good old fashioned archival concepts such as provenance and context to give them a better appreciation of what the data they are looking at is actually telling them or how much it can be relied upon (rather than what they wish it was telling them and how much faith they may wish to place in it).

To give the Economist its due it does also look beyond the potential and address some of the challenges (and not just in relation to security – see previous post). Admittedly it does appear a little confused about the subject of data retention stating that ‘current roles on digital records state that data should never be stored for longer than necessary because they might be misused or inadvertently released’. It then goes on to state that ‘in future it is more likely that companies will be required retain all digital files, and ensure their accuracy, rather than to delete them’ – a vision of the future likely to strike fear into every records managers heart. There are some immediate flaws obvious in this logic (in the EU at least) where current data protection laws prevent this in relation to personal data, and elsewhere the Economist itself draws attention to the problems that storing such massive amounts of data is causing to the existing technical and resource infra-structure that Google et al rely on which would seem to favour a more selective approach to data retention on pragmatic grounds if nothing else. But whether such concerns are considered enough to stop the ‘lets keep and exploit everything’ bandwagon which lies behind much of this report is at best debatable and at worst, I suspect, distinctly unlikely.

Information Management: the forgotten issue of the cloud

2010-02-24T15:05:00.003Z

There was an interesting supplement on Cloud Computing from MediaPlanet within this Saturday’s Daily Telegraph (Ok I know it’s now Wednesday, but it takes me most of the week to wade through the weekend papers!).
The supplement - of which I can sadly find no English language online version - appears to be aimed at a senior management audience and is deliberately light on the technical detail, choosing to focus more on the benefits to the organisation which moving towards cloud-based computing can bring (institutional agility, flexibility and cost saving seem to be the main arguments in favour). It also includes ‘5 steps to making the most of cloud’ which are:

1. See the possibilities
2. Consider security
3. Use it to your advantage
4. Push the boundaries
5. Consider logistics

It would be hard to disagree with any of these, but its steps 2 and 5 which interested me most. For whilst steps 1, 3 and 4 (and, indeed, the rest of the content in the supplement) is designed to articulate the advantages and to push the potential it is these two steps which are designed to sound a note of caution and to instil the need for a cautious, managed approach to the management of the risks involved.

But if you were to rely solely on this supplement for guidance you’d be mistaken for assuming that data security should be your only concern when adopting a cloud-based computing environment (especially as the ‘logistics’ which Step 5 encourages you to consider relate to issues of security and mobile devices so is, in effect, just an extension of Step 2: Consider Security).

Aside from a passing mention of data protection and the potential need for some organisations to keep certain data within ‘certain geographic boundaries’ (which I’m assuming is again essentially related to the requirements of the Data Protection Act) what is entirely missing is an appreciation of the information management implications of moving data to the cloud. There is no acknowledgement of the need to ensure that current levels of record and information management control, say in relation to resource discovery or retention, must be continued into the cloud; nor any recognition of the potential problems of ensuring that this is so.

Interestingly, some of the issues which may come to the surface if these concerns are ignored are obliquely and inadvertently acknowledged – for example the point is made that in the cloud you pay as you consume, but the point is not expanded to its logical conclusion that it therefore pays to know exactly what information you still need to store (and pay for) and what can safely be destroyed. Likewise, the point is made that one of the biggest advantages foreseen for the ‘G Cloud’ (the UK Government Application Store which is currently being trialled) “could be allowing departments to share non-sensitive data so paper work is reduced and processes sped up” but no consideration is given as to how ‘sensitive’ and ‘non-sensitive’ data might be appropriately identified and controlled within the cloud.

On a more positive note Mark Taylor from Microsoft draws attention to the need for increasing standardisation so that the cloud ‘runs along the same principles and business models no matter who is managing the hosting’. Might the development of such standards and interoperability offer a potential means by which a single management layer can be placed on top of the cloud to allow organisations to consistently manage their information wherever it happens to reside in the cloud? And in doing so might it help address some of the management information issues which this supplement failed to acknowledge?

Practicing what we preach

2009-11-18T11:54:00.000Z

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

2009-11-12T11:35:00.001Z

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

2009-10-23T15:09:00.003+01:00

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
.
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?

2009-10-16T09:29:00.001+01:00

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'

2009-08-26T14:41:00.003+01:00

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

2009-08-19T10:53:00.003+01:00

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

2009-06-29T10:41:00.001+01:00

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.

It's the conversation, stupid

2009-06-09T16:24:00.002+01:00

The thing l like most about Google Wave (at least from the YouTube presentation) is about how everything is geared around the content. Technologies and even concepts that we take for granted as essential, distinct entities in their own right such as email, blog posts, word processing software - even the document itself- all start to seem strangely artificial and inconsequential: what matters is the content and, most importantly of all, the conversation that it represents. It is this conversation or, to be more accurate, these multiple and ongoing conversations that are central to the Wave philosophy with everything else built to enable, support and manage them.

Now from the records manger’s perspective this might all sound like a bit of a nightmare: seamless, perpetual conversations with everyone free (by default) to edit everything. Where is the record? Heck, what is the record? But just as some of the concepts underpinning Wave require us to rethink most of what we take for granted about information creation so too it will its management.

Funnily enough this is similar to a point I made yesterday during a Podcast discussion with James Lappin, Elizabeth Lomas and Stephen Dale (I’ll provide a link when it’s up) which was made before I had any real knowledge of what Wave was about. That is that records management in the future will not be about managing individual objects all with finite and predictable lifespans but about capturing the numerous links between them as part of an ongoing thread if, when and how they are used.

It’s about the context. It’s about the conversation.

A step closer to making Records Management2.0 a reality?

2009-06-04T14:45:00.002+01:00

Readers of ‘Managing the Crowd’ will be aware that I ended the book with some suggestions regarding how records management functionality could be successfully integrated into and applied to Web2.0 content. One of these was to create “a folksonomy service that can penetrate ddep content, at an individual content level, across multiple service providers". I argued that the logic underpinning social bookmarking tools such as Delicious already took us many steps forward in this direction. Obviously at present they are only used for resource discovery but (I argued) there was no reason why this functionality could not be extended to also allow the individual user and the ‘crowd’ to which they belong to also assign retention and management criteria alongside search metadata.

At the time of writing the book the main factor preventing this from making the leap from theory to practice was that “at present, Delicious works at a level above that required for our purposes. It may allow users to tag individual web pages, but does not extend this functionality to enable tagging of ‘deep web’ content, for example documents within a Google Docs account and presentations within Spresent.” (pg 131).
Earlier this week I was sent the following email announcement being sent to all owners of lists hosted by the JISCmail service.

“From Tuesday 16th June, every list homepage and every posting stored on the JISCMail online archives will include a bookmark/share button which will have links to a selection of social bookmarking/sharing sites.

Social Bookmarking allows you to share, store, organise, search, tag and manage webpages you would like to be able to revisit in the future, or share with others. For example if a posting is made to a JISCMail list that you know will be of interest to someone else you can email a link to that person using our button. Alternatively you can choose one of the social networking sites you are registered with, e.g. Twitter or Facebook, to share the link with a group of people. You might use the sharing button to bookmark a link to your list homepage or a particular posting on a list that you can revisit at a later date on a site such as Delicious.”

So there we have it: it is now possible to extend the reach of social booking down to an individual file level (in this case the millions of emails archived on the JISCmail website). Now, of course there may be many other technical, professional or practical obstacles preventing the realisation of my idea but it seems to me that one potentially major one may just have disappeared…

Is it worth investing in records management?

2009-05-28T13:31:00.000+01:00

Regular readers of this blog will know of my concerns regarding the state of the evidence-base supporting the quantifiable benefits of investing in records management. Lots of claims have been made (and endlessly repeated) over the years, but scratch beneath the surface and most turn out to be flawed in methodology, years old, biased in approach or simply apocryphal (or, in some cases, all three!!).

I won’t rehash the dangers of this here as I have posted on this not long ago. Instead I wanted to point readers to work that colleagues and I from JISC infoNet are doing to attempt to address this apparent void.

One of our first tasks is to try to ascertain whether the picture concerning the current evidence base is really as bleak as I have just portrayed. True, the literature review that we are currently conducting seems to be doing little to alleviate these fears, but of course to rely only on published papers and articles would be to ignore the fact that many organisations may well have conducted their own work in measuring the impact of records and information management initiatives for their own, internal reasons. As a result, loads of potentially invaluable data, plus the experiences from those who obtained it may be lurking behind closed doors.

In an attempt to unlock these doors we are currently running an online survey, open to all who have attempted to quantify and measure the impact of records management initiatives on their organisation, regardless of the sector or country you operate in. Further details and links to the survey are available from a post published today on the JISC infoNet blog.

Hopefully the results of this survey will provide a truer impression of the current evidence-base and, perhaps, provide us with a few leads to follow up on from those who seem to be really active in this area. All of which will help inform the framework that we are hoping to develop and release over the summer which will help those who wish to measure the impact of their records management activities and demonstrate if and when they achieve a return on their investment.

New horizons and records management

2009-04-24T15:13:00.001+01:00

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

2009-04-20T13:37:00.004+01:00

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…

2009-04-03T15:47:00.002+01:00

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.

"The new operating system for business"

2009-03-26T16:25:00.002Z

Interesting little interview with Don Tapscott discussing his views on how Web2.0 is fundamentally changing the nature of business.

I was particularly struck by the comments: “In his view, business models and strategies must be restructured to reflect the highly ‘networked’ nature of society in the Web 2.0 age. For Tapscott, social networks are nothing less than “the new operating system for businesses”
and
“ businesses must understand and incorporate the learning and working styles of the generation that has grown up with the Internet if they are to attract the best talent.”

I couldn’t agree more with both these statements and indeed, as readers of this blog and my book will already know, have repeatedly made very similar comments over the past couple of years.

If Tapscott is right and social networks are ‘the new operating system for business’ the imperative for records management to adapt to meet this challenge seems every bit as urgent as I have been suggesting.

Measure for measure

2009-03-06T14:36:00.001Z

Those who’ve heard me present at various events over the past year or so will know of my growing concern that the RM profession regularly appears guilty of making unsubstantiated claims about how investment in this area will increase organisational effectiveness, decrease overheads and generally offer a positive return on investment. Note: I’m not saying that none of these are necessarily true, simply that there appears to be no empirical, reliable data to prove these assertions. There’s no shortage of 'statistics' banded about but, despite my best efforts, none of those quoting them have so far been able to provide me with the definitive raw data from which they are apparently derived (the mythical Coopers & Lybrand study being the most noteworthy and oft quoted example).

Delegates at our Building Bridges conference held in Newcastle earlier this week spent much of the second day debating whether or not this is, indeed, the case and whether it in fact matters – after all, there has always been more to RM than simply the bottom line with improvements to corporate accountability, legal compliance and maintenance of the historic record all being important, but essentially immeasurable, benefits. But, at the same time, I remain fearful (particularly in the current economic environment) that RM remains vulnerable if it cannot be seen to pay its way. I know of several RM projects that are multi-million pound initiatives. Is it really conceivable that an investment on this scale is unable to demonstrate the ROI? Even if it was during the boom times I very much doubt whether this is the case now – or will be for several years to come. Moreover, as budgets diminish so our organisation’s risk threshold will, by necessity, get higher leaving even our tried and tested compliance arguments more open to scrutiny than before. Worse still, we run the risk that if we are unable to prove that we are, indeed, part of the solution that management may mistakenly start to view us as part of the problem – representing an administrative overhead and bureaucratic lily-guilders that can no longer be afforded.

I’m currently embarking on a JISC-funded project to discover whether it is possible to quantifiably measure the return on investment of RM and, if so, to produce data which proves this once and for all (at least for the F/HE sectors). That this work should be happening against the current backdrop of economic turmoil is completely coincidental, but may yet prove the most important driver for completing it that there could be.

More on the end of records management as a profession

2009-02-04T09:47:00.001Z

Rather than try to respond to the significant number of comments that my last post generated individually, or within the comments area I thought it might be worth expanding on my theme a little in a new post.

As you might expect, I had considered whether the comments in the review that I alluded to and the thinking that lay behind it, actually represented a positive step in the development of RM. If I genuinely believed that this was evidence of the growing influence of the RM profession and our emergence as a profession into the IT mainstream I would see it as a source for optimism. Alas, however, I fear this is not the case for reasons I shall explain, but first a point of clarification.

It is worth noting that my previous post was entitled “The end of RM as a profession in its own right” and I think we need to draw a distinction between the aims, principles and methods which lay behind records management as a discipline and the Records Management profession as the practitioners of that art. I have long said (in my book and in numerous other places) that the aims and objectives which lay behind records management are now more needed than ever before but that the way in which we, as a profession, currently try to achieve them will shortly no longer be fit for purpose. I think the recommendations of the 30 year rule reflect this. Yes, organisations and society need records management now more than ever but it is no longer automatically considered the role or preserve of the records management profession to deliver this. That role is now (rightly or wrongly) assumed to fall to IT and that seems to me to be a significant shift (and not a positive one for our profession).

I have always been of the opinion that there is nothing particularly complicated or difficult to understand about records management theory. It is not alchemy nor some other arcane ‘dark art’, nor does it require the kind of specialist knowledge that say medicine, dentistry or nuclear physics does. It is a particular perspective, a unique viewpoint and set of priorities regarding how a certain subset of information should be managed. In short, we have been interested in elements of information use and management that nobody else to date has been. This is not to belittle the profession, this unique viewpoint has served us and our organisations well but it also means that we are vulnerable. For a decade now myself and a few select professional colleagues have foreseen the day when the IT profession would ‘get’ records management: when their priorities would change (or be changed for them by circumstances) so that they had to start considering things from the records management perspective. And that when that day came, the records management profession may well find that their former USP had suddenly gone and that they were struggling to demonstrate the value that they could bring. In this situation our organisations would inevitably start to look to the IT department, not the records manager for answers and solutions and this, I fear, is what the statement in the review reflects.

So, yes, I agree with many of those who left comments, when they say that we should view this as a positive step for records management but I still remain concerned that it marks a milestone in the decline of the records management profession – at least in its current guise.

The end of RM as a profession in its own right?

2009-02-03T13:16:00.004Z

I'm sure most of you (in the UK at least) will be aware of the review commissioned by the Govt into the 30 year rule. Likewise I suspect many will have read Lord Dacre's findings and recommendations. I say 'suspect' as there doesn't seem to have been much discussion of them so far on the usual RM and archive lists, but maybe I've just missed it in the information (and literal!) blizzard.

I'm sure all will come to their own conclusions about the pros and cons of moving towards a 15 year rule and don't propose to comment on this here. What I did find particularly illuminating was paragraph 8.23

"We recommend that electronic record capture should be an integral part of the
IT infrastructure of government, and not a ‘bolt-on’ activity. Work on creating an IT
strategy to ensure that records are automatically kept needs to be accelerated."

The message seems pretty clear to me. The capture, management and maintenance of electronic records should now be considered an IT function, integrated within the mainstream of IT service delivery. Reference to records management as a 'bolt-on activity' confirms my fears that we have effectively allowed ourselves to be increasingly marginalized over recent years whilst the game moves on and upwards without us.

So, Records Managers, its time to open the office door, walk down the corridor to the Head of IT and pass the baton marked 'Records Management' over to him or her to deal with and for us to return to our warehouses full of paper and hanging files...

Hats off to Travis County, Texas

2009-02-02T11:35:00.002Z

I was very impressed by the route that the RM team at Travis Country, Texas have decided to take to inform their approach to email archiving. Rather than trying to solve the problem themselves, buy in a 'solution' or hope that the issue will just go away they have embraced Web2.0 technologies to start a debate within the profession and to canvas the views of fellow professionals to inform their decision making.

This approach involves a series of web pages outlining the situation they find themselves in and explaining the three basic routes they see ahead, each clearly explained by means of a series of short YouTube clips.

They are then encouraging all RIM professionals to contribute their views and opinions via a project blog

Not only is the integrated use of such tools for this kind of purpose pretty unusual in our profession, but the content is also thought-provoking too. The three options under discussion span the range of thinking in this area and their observations that records management is now operating in 'a new dynamic' and that many of the approaches that we still try and employ were originally designed for a (completely different) paper-based world certainly rings true to me.

Every cloud (computing) has a silver lining...

2009-01-29T10:22:00.003Z

Interesting to read in the Financial Times yesterday that "the current economic crisis could force Web 2.0 into the business mainstream" as "A downturn raises questions about how organisations are structured and how they tap into the knowledge and expertise of employees, suppliers and customers". Indeed the mere fact that the FT sees Web2.0/Enterprise2.0 as a topic worthy of analysis is, in itself, evidence of its growing acceptance throughout the worlds of commerce and industry.

The piece also offers a nice summary of the perceived advantages of Enterprise 2.0 which provides organisations with most of what makes the Web 2.0 movement so exciting whilst also providing the reassurance of offering "audit trails, access control, version control, authentication, provisioning and back-up" (all words to warm the cockles of a records manager's heart).

As those who have read Managing the Crowd or heard me speak on this know I have always been a little sceptical about whether Enterprise 2.0 really is a sustainable longterm option or whether it will always be a compromise too far which ends up pleasing no one. I still have some concerns on this score, but, by the same token if it instead represents a temporary stepping stone towards a bolder future then that may be a different matter altogether

New year, new predictions

2009-01-09T09:48:00.003Z

It always fascinates me how the dawn of a new year seems to bring out the soothsayer in us, with all manner of commentators and observers from all walks of life taking the opportunity to predict what the year ahead will bring. Well this is a temptation that I intend to resist, but that doesn't stop me from being interested in the efforts of others.

One, in particular, has been brought to my attention my Andrew Warland, a fellow contributor to the Records Management2.0 Ning site and relates to 2009 being the year that the internet truly goes mobile

Coming after a year when data loss scandals were virtually a weekly occurrence it remains to be seen whether this hints at a solution (with less losable data being stored locally on remote devices) or a likely escalation of the problem. Hopefully the former...

I was also struck by the sentence "The brittleness of PC metaphors on mobile devices coupled with the concept of context speaks to an emergent and important trend on the horizon – smart and intuitive interfaces that predict user intent through an understanding of relationships", not least because I'm trying to find time at the moment to write a paper for the Records Management Journal entitled 'Forget Electronic Records Management, its Automated Records Management that we desperately need' which will say that this is exactly the route that the RM community also needs to be going down: using technology to intelligently assess both the information and its context and to automatically make management decisions accordingly.

Guidance to institutions outsourcing their email

2008-12-19T10:49:00.003Z

I've recently been involved, along with colleagues from JISC and UCISA, in pulling together some guidance for those universities and colleges who are considering outsourcing their student email services to a 3rd party.

One of the most interesting discoveries when working on this was the number of institutions who are either actively considering or actually already going down this path. This is no theoretical 'what if' scenario any more.

Interestingly all institutions have so far limited the scope of their outsourcing to student email services only as these seem to throw up less management issues than working with staff email and related information systems. But if these early projects are successful I wonder how soon it will be before someone decides to extend the reach of their outsourcing solutions to incorporate institutional information and data regardless of these complications.

Do you run serious records management?

2008-11-19T11:34:00.003Z

I received a curiously titled email the other day (it was a commercial sales one from Aiim, no doubt received by lots of records professionals, so no confidences being broken).

Its subject heading was 'Do you run serious records management?' (as opposed to what: trivial records management, fun records management?...) It was advertising a one day training event in Slough around Moreq2. Aside from the title, the email's opening lines also struck me as interesting:

Does your organisation have a heavyweight records management obligation?
If so, MoReq2 - the Model Requirements Specification for the Management of Electronic Records - is something you need to know about.

I think this is probably the first time I have seen an open and 'official' admission that the kind of 'heavyweight' RM systems covered by Moreq and formally by the TNA testing regime are only likely to prove suitable in a limited number of specific, 'niche' areas. It definitely seems as though the days when EDRMS were being touted as the answer for organisations large and small and from every sector under the sun have well and truly gone for good. Certainly, despite its slightly odd tone, the email's title also implies that we are witnessing a welcome return to the notion of 'fitness for purpose' when it comes to records management - rather than the recent assumption that 'one size fits all'

A spot of vanity publishing

2008-11-13T13:48:00.004Z

There's been a small flurry of reviews of Managing the Crowd being published over the past couple of weeks. It's always fascinating (and a little daunting) reading what fellow professionals have to say about your work and I've been delighted - and relieved! - at the reception it has received. Thankfully the tone of most seems to be 'I don't necessarily agree with all you've had to say, but I'm really glad you said it' which is exactly the response I was hoping for.

Anyway, for those interested in hearing what others have made of it I can point you in the direction of reviews by:
- James Lappin in the Records Management Society Bulletin Issue 46, November 2008
- Barbara Reed and Stephen Clarke in the latest RMAA IQ magazine
- Marieke Guy in Ariadne (available online - hurrah!)

My thanks to all those who have taken the time and trouble to publish their thoughts and views about the book and in doing so are helping to keep debate about the issues well and truly alive

Why doesn’t the government realise our green credentials?

2008-11-07T16:36:00.002Z

It’s hard to ignore the ever growing pressure on organisations, particularly those in the public sector, to reduce the carbon footprint of their IT infrastructure. This culminated recently in Greening Government ICT, a 20 page paper produced by the Cabinet Office to help government departments to play their role.

It’s a mine of useful information, ranging from the simple and obvious (‘shutdown PCs after office hours’) to the technical (‘specify low power consumption central processing units and high efficiency power units’).

Point 18 in Annex B appears to offer promise to records managers everywhere by mentioning a ‘data centre audit’ as a recommended step to be taken before then spoiling it by clarifying that this is about where your servers should be located in a room to increase air supply rather than referring to any form of information audit as we would recognise.

The ‘Areas for potential carbon reduction’ does at least mention ‘Remove unnecessary/duplicated data or information’ as an action (though as point 44 of 51 its hardly given high priority). Even more tellingly it has nothing listed under ‘possible implementation methods’. How depressing is that for records management? Apparently the Cabinet Office know of no possible technique for identifying what information stored within an organistion is ‘unnecessary’ and can, therefore, be safely deleted? Isn’t that exactly what records management, and appraisal in particular, have to offer: a proven methodology for identifying what information still has value and must be retained and which can be safely removed?

What a missed opportunity.

What's in a name?

2008-10-28T14:17:00.002Z

Alan Bell raises some interesting issues in a recent posting about the wisdom (or not) of ‘Records Management2.0’ as term, his main argument being that although the technology and how we need to do things has changed this has not, and should not, change our fundamental goals and objectives and that as such “ all this talk of version 2.0 is perhaps not as helpful as it could be”.

As the person who coined the phrase Records Management2.0 (though hardly original I know) it may be surprising to hear that I don’t necessarily disagree with much of Alan’s argument, as the following extract from my keynote at the RMS conference indicates:

“The archive and records management professions are innately conservative; indeed we rightly pride ourselves on taking the ‘long view’, a position that is entirely appropriate when you consider that we are responsible for record collections often spanning several centuries. But, I would argue that whilst our professional goals and objectives should remain absolutely fixed and solid, this does not mean that our methodology and working practice must do likewise. The two are not inextricably linked and indeed it is not just desirable, but necessary, that we are prepared to constantly and fundamentally challenge the way in which we do things, to ensure that we are fit and able as a profession to continue to strive to achieve our objectives”

Where Alan and I do differ, I think, is in the degree of change required; whether this does or doesn’t justify the moniker ‘2.0’ and the practical usefulness of it as a term. For all the reasons laid out in my book I do believe that the issues raised by the Web2.0 movement – and not just of a technical nature, but reflecting the changing attitudes and behaviour of users, the nature of organisations and how information is viewed in culture and society – do fundamentally challenge enough of the old order of records management to make a clear division with what has gone before both necessary and desirable. Though at the same time we should not lose sight of the fact that for all the apparent difference implied by the 2.0 suffix, it is still attached to the term ‘Records Management’ and as such there is more that unites us than divides us.

In many respects I think Alan’s thoughts and this response demonstrate that the term Records Management2.0 is serving its intended purpose. I believe the most important role it can currently play is in raising awareness of the issues and generating debate (and hopefully solutions) about what this means for the records management profession. My own view remains that the depth and degree of rethinking and change required does legitimise the decision to call it something other than just ‘records management’, and given that such change is a direct result of the impact of Web2.0 it seems to make sense to me to be obvious about that link.

For me, another advantage of keeping a very deliberate and obvious link between Web2.0 and Records Management2.0 is to avoid confusion about its aims. From some of the responses I have received both from some individuals and professional bodies I do sometimes worry that people think I am advocating throwing out all that has gone before and replacing it wholesale with the kinds of methods and techniques outlined in the book. Nothing could be further from the truth. Where records management works, great. We have ISO15489 and a raft of other standards and best practice telling us all how to do it in time-honoured fashion and there is little or no place (for now at least) to be taking the kind of steps that I am advocating. Hopefully the Records Management2.0 title makes it clear that what I am talking about are solutions designed to fit very particular issue – those with their origins very firmly in the technology and movement that we know as Web2.0.

A Records Manager's 2.0 Manifesto

2008-10-24T15:50:00.004+01:00

Taking our inspiration from Laura Cohen's Library 2.0 Manifesto, the following 12 statements were agreed by contributors to an online forum hosted on the Records Management2.0 Ning social network held on Friday 3rd October.

The aim of this manifesto is to encourage records professionals to positively embrace the opportunities and challenges presented by the increasing use of online technologies (variously referred to as Web2.0, Office2.0 social software, cloud computing and Software as a Service) within their organizations and to actively consider their implications for records management theory and practice. By doing so we hope to encourage debate within the profession, promote research and stimulate innovation – thus empowering records managers to play a full and important contribution to the shaping of this major new IT paradigm.

A full list of those who contributed to the drafting of this manifesto is included at the bottom of this document.

1. I recognize that the world of information culture is changing fast and that records management needs to respond positively to these changes to provide systems, policies, advice and services that are helpful to my organization, my teams and my colleagues.
2. I will educate myself about the information culture of my users and look for ways to incorporate what I learn into the records management solutions we offer.
3. I will let go of previous practices if there is a better way to do things now and will actively work towards the elaboration and formulation of new principles and practices.
4. Whilst I recognize the need for final assured quality in record-keeping systems this should not inhibit constant experimentation, innovation and development.
5. I will help users to take advantage of the Web2.0 services they need to deliver the agreed benefits to our organization.
6. I will avoid requiring users to see things in records management terms but, rather, will shape services to reflect users' preferences and expectations.
7. I recognize that records management does not have all the answers and will work openly, collaboratively and constructively with other IM and IT professionals in tackling the issues we face.
8. I recognize that it is not easy for users to keep records and will endeavor to develop automated and embedded RM solutions so as not to add unnecessary burdens to their working life.
9. I will work to improve the organization’s capability of keeping and understanding its records so far as is possible, whilst recognizing that we will never have perfect solutions for capturing and managing our records.
10. I will, at all times, strive to maintain a balance between the needs of my users and the legal, regulatory and operational requirements of my organization.
11. I recognize that although technology moves quickly, organizations often change slowly and will work to expedite our responsiveness to change, whatever its pace.
12. I will strive to deliver a service both users and management can trust and that is transparent and open to all stakeholders.

Contributors to the drafting of the above include:
Steve Bailey, Matthew Brown, Clare Cowling, Nicola Franklin, Rachel Hardiman, Tony Haworth, James Lappin, Elizabeth Lomas, Ton de Looijer, Tom Munzer, Phillip Ruston, Nicole Schulz

We are currently exploring the possibility of having this manifesto officially 'endorsed' by some of our professional bodies and would love to hear from any representatives from such bodies. We would also be interested to hear what individual records professionals think about the manifesto and how best to further promote its contents to our fellow professionals

What happens when there are no 'clouds' in sight?

2008-10-21T16:20:00.002+01:00

Its all very well outsourcing your mission critical applications to 3rd party providers, but what happens if they prove to be less reliable than expected?

The recent outage of Gmail for 24 hours seems to have reminded many IT managers of some of the potential downsides of cloud computing and of no longer being a master of their own domain (literally!).

"a major concern and objection to SaaS applications is their performance and availability, since they're provided by the vendor via the Internet and accessed by end users through browsers. When the applications become slow or altogether unavailable because of problems in the vendors' data centers, IT administrators have little to do but sit and wait for the problem to be fixed. This often creates extremely stressful and tense situations for them if the outages are prolonged and their end users become angry."

More details of this incident and the problems caused are available from Computerworld

Apple's Genius points the way for RM2.0

2008-09-26T15:27:00.002+01:00

In Chapter 9 of ‘Managing the Crowd’ I make the point that “Largely as a result of … technical advances, we now live in a world defined by information storage; ours is now a culture in which size most definitely matters. Just take each new generation of iPod that hits our shops. Have you ever seen an improved ability to decide what tracks you want to delete quoted as a selling point? No. The fact that it now has a 16Gb memory, compared with the 8Gb available last year, or the 4Gb the previous year, however, most definitely is”.

In this context it was interesting to read over the weekend that iPod will no longer be selling their 160GB iPod Classic. As the Daily Telegraph puts it, “ (perhaps) people have realised that, although the iPod has the potential to put their entire CD library in their pocket, they only ever listen to a few hundred favourite songs”. So maybe there are limits to our love affair with storage after all.

More interesting still, particularly in relation to Records Mgt 2.0, is the new ‘music-recommendation engine’ which the new Nano has built into it. According to the article by Claudine Beaumont “Genius will scan through your music collection looking at genres, the number of albums and songs you have by a particular artist, as well as the ratings you have given them. It will also look at the characteristics of the song itself, such as beats per minute… (it then) beams it back to the iTunes mothership. From there, it is able to build dynamic playlists of other recommended tracks, based not only on your library, but that of other iTunes users with similar tastes”.

So here we have the appraisal of large volumes of content based on information value and decided by a combination of both user opinion and user behaviour. Plus a system which combines the views and actions of the individual with those of the broader user community to provide a more informed analysis based on the ‘wisdom of the crowd’. Well whad’ya know. If we were talking about online business records, rather than music records, I’d say that Apple have just taken a pretty big stride towards realising Records Management 2.0.

Google - the future of the newpaper archive?

2008-09-09T15:27:00.002+01:00

Another interesting innovation from Google, News Archive Search that will make 'millions of pages of archived newspaper content available for free'.

Okay so most of the publications currently covered are from the US, but it surely won't be long until many of the major UK papers and periodicals start to get the same treatment?

I'm sure it will prove popular with many users, able now to search and browse from the comfort of their home PC using the same simple search engine that they have grown accustomed to. It might prove more of a mixed blessing for the archive repositories that currently house and provide access to the original newspapers (or their nausea inducing counterparts on microfilm): on the one hand encouraging would-be researchers to continue their studies using the additional material they may hold within their repository; but on the other resulting in far less 'bums on seats' within the archive. Plus, of course, increasing the popular assumption that there is no need to visit an archive any more as its "all available on the web"...

Office 2.0 – a reality check?

2008-09-01T11:32:00.002+01:00

Rachel posted such an interesting comment on her experience of using Office2.0 technologies at the recent Society of Archivist’s conference that I thought it deserved picking up in a separate posting.

Rachel is absolutely right in pointing to how reliant the ‘dream’ of Office2.0 is on the nuts and bolts of technical infrastructure and quite correct that at the moment that infrastructure is not yet sufficiently developed to turn the dream into a reality. However, I suspect the phrase ‘not yet’ is really key here. In response to Rachel’s experiences I think I would offer the following points (aside from a hearty ‘well done’ for the whole experiment!).

The infrastructure is still developing, but developing fast. I know (from bitter experience!) that relying on wifi access for internet access when on the road can still be a very patchy and frustrating experience. But, what I would say is cast your mind back 5 years or so and then compare it with today. Five years ago I couldn’t even get a mainline broadband connection for my rural home. Today, not only do I get a reasonable BB connection, but I actually first read Rachel’s comments on my Blackberry whilst walking the dog round a field this morning…

Similar evidence of progress can be seen around the country, whether it be wifi hotspots in stations and coffee shops or the increasing number of hotels that are now offering connections (including an increasing number providing free access). Of course this isn’t the same as being universal and I suspect that it will be some time – perhaps another 5 years or so – before coverage begins to approach this. But I find it hard to believe that it won’t happen soon – just look at the rise in mobile phone coverage over the past decade.

Incidentally, Rachel may have had more luck with a 3G card than she suspected. I’ve used one for several years now and though not without their own frustrations, do mean that access to the internet is possible pretty much anywhere you can get a mobile signal (at least at GPRS speeds, if not 3G).

It might also be worth checking out the potential of Google’s Gears. I’ve not yet got round to trying it myself, but the logic of a piece of software which enables offline access to services which are normally only available online (including Google Docs and Zoho) would seem a potentially valuable means of plugging this temporary gap as seamlessly as possible.

So, I guess in summary its worth saying that this blog is called ‘futurewatch’ for reason! The reality of the universal, seamless access to the web that is required to fully realise Office2.0 may still be a little way off, but personally I still have no doubts that it is the direction in which we are heading.

How not to panic when you lose your laptop...

2008-08-27T16:38:00.012+01:00

There was an interesting post (now sadly removed) from a delegate at the Office2.0 conference which flew in the face of the current convention: a man who fears that he has lost he his laptop but loses no sleep about the data he might have lost. Okay, so losing something as valuable as a portable computer would have been no laughing matter and then there is all the hassle with filling out insurance forms, sourcing a new machine etc, but (and here is the crucial difference) no panic about the data that’s been lost with it. No fear about personal information falling into the wrong hands. No paranoia about identify theft.

The difference? This owner of this particular laptop relies on his laptop for little more than access to the internet. No data is stored on it (and in all likelihood virtually no applications either). He is a proponent of Office2.0 technology and as a result his data is all stored on secure, backed-up, safely housed, hulking great servers that can’t get left in the back of a taxi or dropped down the back of a pub sofa.

Okay, so I no it is not as black and white as that and there are plenty of potential risks to data security posed by reliance on external service providers and wireless internet connections – but all the same, perhaps in the current climate there is something to be said for moving back to a situation where the client machine is little more than a dumb terminal, devoid of stored data and therefore devoid of risk and of value to a third party. A move which Office 2.0 is perfectly placed to enable. It lets your staff wander around the country with laptops, it lets them work wherever they need and it lets them have access to the data they require - it just doesn't let them take it with them, with all the attendant risks this seems to bring...

Records Management as part of Staff Development?

2008-08-11T16:53:00.003+01:00

We held our first online workshop on the new Records Management 2.0 social networking site last Friday on the topic of ‘what does RM have to offer the information literate user? Though the number of participants was quite low, the debate was lively and certainly interesting enough to justify arranging another scheduled workshop on another topic in the near future.

One of the thoughts which the discussion prompted in my own mind was the potential value of the RM function actually forming part of the ‘staff development’ (or similar) unit within an organisation – usually to be found as part of the Human Resources function. As we all know, the records management team - or individual records manager - can currently be found in a wide variety of places within the organisational structure (IT, information services, legal/compliance, facilities management, Chief Execs office etc) but rarely, if ever, within HR.

At first glance they might seem unlikely bedfellows, especially given the great stress placed on RM as part of legal compliance in recent years. But my fear is (as expressed during the discussion) that we, as a profession, are currently seen by many individual users as being too bureaucratic, heavy-handed and ‘dictatorial’ and therefore as part of ‘the problem’; rather than as an ally, someone with practical answers to real problems and someone who understands and sympathises with their needs. I know many of us strive to take as many steps in this direction as we possibly can, but perhaps by so often being inextricably linked to the policy and management functions of the organisation we make this task far harder to achieve than it would be if we were seen to be on the side of the users. After all, at the end of the day it is their actions – rather than policy frameworks and central diktats – which have the greatest impact on how our records are managed. To a great extent this has always been the case, but is a trend which continues to increase the more technology continues to empower the individual user.

There is often a lot of talk about the records manager making use of the ‘carrot’ as well as ‘stick’ but my suspicion is that this is usually more along the lines of "this new process/system/policy that I am about to force you to use is actually great because…", rather than "what could we do to help make your life easier?".

An admirable summary of Managing the Crowd

2008-08-05T15:50:00.003+01:00

I am indebted to James Lappin at TFPL for posting as succinct a summary of the main points contained within Managing the Crowd as you are ever likely to find.

In fact, it makes me wonder what I wasted the other 60,000-odd words on...

Launch of the Records Management 2.0 social networking site

2008-08-01T08:43:00.005+01:00

Some of you may recall from previous postings that I have been keen to try to conitnue discussion and debate about the future of records management and in particular with regards to its role in the 'Web 2.0 world'; and hopefully to find ways of enabling those with an interest in this area to work together to create practical solutions.

After investigating a few different approaches I settled on creating a social network within Ning, not least because this platform combines the ability to keep in touch with like-minded colleagues with useful tools including online forums and event management. To be honest, I was still thinking through the details of how best to take this foward when a particularly interesting and robust debate about the future of records management on the Records-managment-uk jiscmail list convinced me that now was the right time to run with this (ready or not!). As with any such site, it will succeed or fail depending on the commitment of its members. Initial take up has been brisk, lets hope this burst of enthusiasm is sustained and turned into ongoing collaboration, discussion and progress.

If anyone else would like to join this site, please drop me an email and I will send you an email in return containing the relevant joining instructions.

Separating management from storage

2008-07-21T16:51:00.003+01:00

I’ve recently been mulling over the nature of the relationship between where we store the information we create (the repository) and the rules governing its management – not least because it seems to represent one of the fundamental divides between the approach to records management which I am advocating (RM2.0 for shorthand) and the majority of ECM products on the market.

In the pre-Web 2.0 world there was a division between the applications we used to create information (e.g. MS Word) and the repository we used to store our outputs. We didn’t store our documents in Word, we stored them on our C://, on a separate file server, or even a removable storage device (though the MOD are beginning to wish they hadn’t!). All of which created a separate shared repository available for the storage of unstructured information created by a range of applications. This, in turn, influenced the nature of first EDRMS and latterly ECM technologies, the majority of which included their own separate repository for storage and intrinsically linked it to their management/rules layer.

As noted in Managing the Crowd: "The crucial difference with Web 2.0 services such as You Tube, Flickr, Facebook and the like is that they are content storage repositories as well. They no longer just represent the tools, but also the filing cabinet" which changes things considerably – especially when you consider that the majority of these services may be hosted outside the organisation. In this model there is no shared underpinning repository, nor is it possible to create and rely upon an intrinsic link between the management/rules layer and the repository of content we wish it to control. To my mind, this places those systems which are built upon the assumption of a combined repository and rules layer at a severe disadvantage by closing off the ability to manage information which it does not itself ‘physically’ hold.

One of the reasons for musing over this now was in the wake of an interesting chat I had the other day with some folks from Computer Associates marking the release of their new CA Records Manager product. In contrast to most other ECM products it apparently does not include its own integral repository – it’s a management layer only, managing content in its original native location. Though there are still currently limitations in terms of how widely this management layer can be applied (not yet extending to encompass the externally hosted Web2.0 services mentioned earlier) it seems to me to at least represent a more open-ended solution which at least offers the promise of achieving some of these wider, more demanding goals, further down the line.

The need for dynamic records management

2008-07-09T17:03:00.001+01:00

I’ve made the point before that one of the greatest challenges posed by Web 2.0 to records management is the fact that the underpinning focus of control has now shifted significantly from the organisation to the individual (a fact acknowledged by Time magazine two years ago when it made ‘You’ its prestigious ‘Person of the Year’ in recognition of the fact that in the Web 2.0 world ‘You’ control the information age. This trend is, of course, contrary to many of the assumptions on which records management is based which relies upon and extols the virtues of organisation-wide standards, policies and conformity.

In the latest print edition of Information World Review (though curiously not yet on their online version which is still showing last month’s column) David Tebbutt alludes to the same general trend in relation to social networking technologies:

“Forget centralised planning and control. No one can plan these connections, or their value, in advance. Power shifts to the participants who, frankly, deserve it most”.

Though not talking specifically about the RM and governance agenda, its not difficult to see how these same trends apply in this context and point to the need for far more reactive and dynamic approaches to information management which are able to adapt and change ‘on the fly’ .

The 10 (published) principles of Records Management 2.0

2008-06-18T15:07:00.001+01:00

Finally, after many months of effort and angst, I have held a copy of my finished, published book in my hand. Authors are prone to equating the process of writing a book with that of pregnancy and giving birth to a child. Rather foolishly I tried this analogy earlier today to my wife who is currently 7 months pregnant….

Without sounding too clichéd I would genuinely love this book to represent the beginning, rather than the end, of this (self imposed) mission to rethink and reinvent records management to ensure it is fit for purpose in the modern world. I have been gratified to receive several supportive emails from around the world from other professionals who share my concerns and desire to initiate change. What I would love to do is to build on this by establishing a community of like-minded records managers, plus those from related professions such as the library world and of course the web technologists. I am sure that collectively there exists the expertise and range of skills required to make a genuine difference to our profession, its just a question of identifying the right online tool(s) to facilitate this creative discussion and, perhaps, finding the odd bit of funding to help make this happen. I make no apologies for the fact that my book raises far more questions than it answers, but now those questions have been raised and are out there for discussion lets move on to actually doing stuff: practical stuff that results in applications and approaches which can make a real difference. If anyone is interested in being part of such a community feel free to let me know, likewise if you are familiar with any ‘business models’ and/or technical platforms to help realise them (or sources of funding of course).

Finally, I thought I would end with some of the conclusions from the book (don’t worry, it doesn’t spoil the ending!). Part of my conclusion is that what we need at present is a set of guiding principles and shared characteristics which help define ‘Records Management 2.0’ and which can be used to set the parameters for any further development work in this area. More detail on each of them is given in the book and naturally they are all open for discussion (see Principle 9) but I thought they might at least get the debate started and were a fitting way to celebrate the arrival of the book.

Records Management 2.0 must be:
1. scalable to an (almost) infinite degree
2. comprehensive: with the potential to address all aspects of the management of information throughout its lifecycle
3. independent of specific hardware, software or physical location
4. extensible and able to absorb new priorities and responsibilities as they emerge
5. potentially applicable to all information
6. proportionate, flexible and capable of being applied to varying levels of quality and detail as required by the information in question
7. a benefits-led experience for users, that offers them a positive incentive to participate
8. marketable to end users, decision makers and stakeholders
9. self-critical and positively willing to embrace challenge and change
10. acceptable to, and driven by, the records management community and its practitioners

The way forward? Niche solutions for niche problems

2008-06-06T17:52:00.001+01:00

One of the (very few) advantages of being laid up at home with tonsillitis has been the opportunity to catch up on some reading when energy levels allow.

One thing which caught my eye and which I never expected to see was an advert in the 17th May issue of The Spectator for an advert for a records management system. After all, think about it? When was the last time you picked up a major, national current affairs periodical, with no ties to records or information management and saw such an advert? I thought so.

The full page advert is for Niche Records Management Systems, a specialist system for police forces and is jokingly aimed at the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson (presumably on the assumption that he should buy it for the Met Police). Of course, in reality, it’s designed to appeal to more than just one person but what we can assume from this is that this is an advert for a records management system which is not aimed at the records manager, nor even the IT manager – but the senior executive, policy maker and purse string holder.

The ad then goes on to spell out in clear empirical terms what benefits have been derived from implementing such a system by other police forces (e.g. “Hampshire Constabulary – a sex offender caught in four hours, not two days; North Wales Police – 42% reduction in case file preparation time” etc).

Now these are bold claims and I’m in no position to be able to comment on the true contribution of records management or this particular system to achieving them (so please don’t see this as any endorsement of this particular product which I know nothing about). For me the interesting thing is to contrast this with the usual way in which RM systems (and often RM as a whole) are marketed. Here it is being sold as a specific answer to a specific problem; rather than as an enterprise-wide ‘bucket’ and ill-defined answer to all information woes.

There is no mention of this system helping your police force to cope with FOI or vague promises to reduce costs. No, its selling points are its direct contribution to achieving the specific organisational targets on which senior managers are themselves judged. This is not RM as a universal panacea, nor RM as self-evidentially important. It is RM as a specifically designed niche solution to a niche problem in a niche market and as such is aggressively targeting a market which we seldom seem to reach.

Increasing interest in Google Apps

2008-05-21T08:20:00.003+01:00

When I first started hitting the conference circuit and blogsphere last year with my concerns regarding what the rise in Web2.0 and particularly Office2.0 solutions might mean for the future of records management, many I spoke to thought it would never happen to their organisation. So whilst it may have been an interesting theoretical exercise, many dismissed much of what I said as being largely irrelevant to their organisations and their circumstances - particularly if they worked in the public sector. Even at the RMS conference in Edinburgh last month many I spoke to were still clinging to this belief.

But all the while the signs are that this is the direction in which we are heading. Whether this be the use of YouTube to conduct public consultation, as addressed earlier this week, or Paul Dodgson's post on the RMS Blog discussing how Leicestershire County Council is already 'dipping its toe' into Google Apps to explore its potential. Certainly in the Higher Education sector things are moving a pace. Whereas this time last year there were only a couple of examples of institutions wishing to outsource their email to externally hosted services there are now dozens with most IT departments currently at least exploring the pros and cons.

Make no mistake about it: this is something we, as records and information professionals, need to come to terms with and quickly - and not just by paying lip service to it, but by developing new approaches which meet records management objectives in radical new ways.

YouTube but who manages?

2008-05-19T15:49:00.003+01:00

Very interesting to hear today that Gordon Brown is to conduct a ‘Question Time style’ discussion forum with members of the general public via YouTube. Of course this isn’t the first time that there have been high profile users of the service, with both the Queen and The Archbishop of Canterbury using it to broadcast their Christmas messages for the first time last December. Number 10 have also had their own YouTube channel for some time now (alongside a rather interesting and eclectic mix of other stations!)

What strikes me as different about today’s announcement, however, is the fact that on this occasion the Government will be using YouTube to conduct a two-way dialogue: with members of the public posting their questions to the PM and (as I understand it) he then answering in kind via the same media. This is a potentially significant difference with resulting implications for its subsequent management. Previously YouTube was just one of many channels of distribution being used (with the apparent safety net that it didn’t matter if the Queen’s speech was being distributed by YouTube as the traditional ‘master copy’ would undoubtedly continue to reside and be managed internally). With this announcement, however, the ‘record’ is surely the combination of both questions asked and answers given with any separation between the two rendering the final record of little informational or evidential value. And it seems to me that only YouTube alone will be in a position to ensure the integrity and longevity of this evidence.

I suppose in this instance it could be argued that hosting such a debate via YouTube is fundamentally little different from the Prime Minster appearing on a televised discussion programme such as Question Time, where the final record belongs to the television production company or broadcaster and is therefore their responsibility to manage, rather than the government’s. Where this comforting analogy might breakdown in the future is if more and more public bodies start to use established Web2.0 services such as YouTube to collect evidence or conduct public enquiries in ways which rely on an accurate record of the dialogue being preserved as part of the formal decision making process. That may still be some way off at the moment, but announcements such as that made today suggest that it is a question of ‘when’, not ‘if’ that day arrives.

EDRMS: The case against

2008-04-22T11:42:00.004+01:00

I've just finished playing my part in the mock trial at the RMS Conference: 'Has EDRMS been a success?' with me playing the part of the prosecution and David Bowen from Audata Ltd acting for the defense. My opening statement pointing out the failings of EDRMS are now available via GoogleDocs (its a 10 minute read).

I should, of course, point out that this is not intended to be a balanced, reasoned piece, but as forceful and convincing an argument as possible (after all, this was my Rumpole of the Bailey moment) - though that's not to say that I wouldn't stand by these comments....

From YouTube to YouManage: The need to democratise information management

2008-04-21T11:41:00.003+01:00

I thought I would make available the text of the keynote presentation that I have just given at the RMS Conference in Edinburgh. The paper explores themes which will be familiar to readers of this blog, namely the challenges posed by the move to Web/Office2.0 and the way in which records management will need to radically change its methodology in order to remain relevant.

The only way I can see to achieve this is for us to control less and trust more: that is to trust the collective wisdom of our users to assist us in the management process. As ever, all thoughts and comments gratefully received and I look foward to continuing the discussion in Edinburgh with delegates over a beer in the bar this evening...

In fact the first feedback is now available via Keith Gregory's live blogging from the conference, worth a look for his take on all the sessions coming up over the next couple of days

Sharepoint: new technology; same issues?

2008-04-02T08:08:00.001+01:00

The TFPL workshop on Microsoft Office Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS) I attended yesterday provided some interesting food for thought at a time when MOSS is increasingly being mentioned as ‘the next big thing’ in records and information management.

I thought I would share a few of the observations which occurred to me at various times throughout the day. Some – or indeed all – may just display my own ignorance of MOSS and its capabilities. If so, I’d appreciate any enlightenment from those who may have more knowledge than I.

Firstly, there seemed a sense of déjà vu about some of the proceedings. Many of the claims now being made of MOSS (a single point of access and management control for all corporate information, integration of structured and unstructured data, reduction of duplication, breaking down of silos etc) seem very similar to the claims which were being made about EDRM systems 6 or 7 years ago - but which rarely seem to have been achieved in practice. Many of the case studies made the point that, though linking to line of business applications and other systems is possible with MOSS, few had actually gone down this route due to the technical complexities and resulting costs (sound familiar?). This begs the question of whether, despite its theoretical potential, will the reality of implementing MOSS, as with EDRMS, actually fall far short of this mark for most organisations, leaving it as a partial solution for unstructured data only?

Secondly, none of the presenters really broached the topic of how MOSS handles external content. Does it allow the user to integrate information they have found useful or have used which it held on external websites or within external services (such as YouTube or Flickr) with the other internal information that it relates to – for example as part of their Mysite or a Teamsite, and if so, how is this achieved?

Thirdly, and on a related theme: there was little real mention of Web2.0 throughout the day and where it was mentioned it was mainly in the context of barring its use or turning it off. Some did mention that they provide their users with their own MOSS-provided, approved versions of blogs and wikis. Though this might seem a sensible compromise I have long had doubts about the sustainability of this approach. Not only will we always struggle to keep pace with the functionality and user experience offered by external providers but also, it seems to me, it risks cutting the technology adrift from most of the underlying movements which make it attractive in the first place (taking advantage of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, ubiquity of access and reuse, the ability for a user to record the ‘totality of their life, free from the rapidly disappearing borders between their work, domestic and professional lives). All themes explored in further detail in my book…

Fourthly, many people still seem to be tying themselves in knots trying to square the circle of which pieces of information represents records and which do not and, as a consequence, some organisations see MOSS as an acceptable vehicle for managing their corporate records (such as DEFRA) where as others do not (such as KPMG). This again touches on issues discussed in my book where I argue that as even the most basic and unofficial piece of information has the power to hurt or help an organisation just as much as the most formal of records –why worry about the distinction?

Lastly, to something that was conspicuous by its absence from any of the presentations – email. There was some talk about the collaborative elements of MOSS reducing reliance on email, but nothing to quantify this – nor to explain how those emails which inevitable must remain are managed within a MOSS environment. I’ve no doubt it is possible, it would just be good to hear how.

So plenty of food for thought and more questions than answers, but, then again, isn’t that always the way??

Managing the Web2.0 'crowd'

2008-03-31T08:53:00.003+01:00

It seems that the Government are beginning to sit up and take note of the potential offered by Web2.0 – and not just from the technical perspective, but in recognition of the social, political and economic change that it promises as well. This is certainly the message which comes through from a recent speech given by Tom Watson MP, Minister for Transformational Government, on Monday 10th March 2008, where he said:

‘So let me tell you where I stand.
I believe in the power of mass collaboration.
I believe that as James Surowiecki says the many are smarter than the few.
I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made and crucially for you in this room the way in which it is delivered – are going to change for ever.
People tell me that we are entering a post-bureaucratic age. I don't accept that. It's just old thinking – laissez faire ideas with a new badge.
The future of government is to provide tools for empowerment, not to sit back and hope that laissez-faire adhocracy will suffice. ‘

The April 2008 edition of Government Computing also devotes its front cover and lead story to Web2.0 and the need for government to "seize the day". In particular this piece points to the need for government to take a step back when it comes to implementing Web2.0 services and rather than going away and "spending a lot of civil service time and money trying to come up with web2.0 applications for themselves, it would be much better to allow more information to become public and allow groups like mySociety… to develop the applications". The piece also points to examples such as Patient Opinion of where sites set up independently from government have proved extremely useful in improving public services.

Interestingly, this piece does not mention any of the issues associated with the management of Web2.0 information. Of course management issues are never the most interesting and attention grabbing elements of a project and so often get consigned to the background, and this might be the case here. It may also be because the whole notion of imposing any form of management control appears out of kilter with the ethos of Web2.0 where, it is often assumed, anything goes – the equivalent of the parents spoiling the kid’s party.

But as our institutions and services increasingly begin to look towards a Web2.0-based future they are going to have to bite the bullet and tackle information management issues to ensure that such services are robust and reliable, as well as novel and democratic.

As I’ve mentioned in passing in previous posts, I have tried to develop this side of the debate by writing a book and I’m pleased (and relieved!) to say that the first draft is now with the publisher and due for release in June. The book is called 'Managing the crowd: Rethinking Records Management for the Web2.0 world' and is published by Facet Publishing. Probably the best way to provide a summary of the central argument of the book is to reproduce the content of the advertising flyer:

Imagine a records management (RM) future where the user community collectively describes the value and properties of a record using the wisdom of the crowd; where records retention, description and purpose are determined by their users, within general boundaries defined by the records manager. It may sound far-fetched, but could represent a way forward for managing records.

It has never been more apparent that RM as traditionally practised will soon no longer be fit for purpose. With the increasing plurality of information sources and systems within an organization, as the deluge of content increases, so the percentage of the organization’s holdings that can be formally classed as records declines.

In the Web 2.0 world new technology is continually changing the way users create and use information. RM must change its approach fundamentally if it is to have a role to play in this new world. This provocative new book challenges records managers to find time amidst the daily operational pressures to debate the larger issues thrown up by the new technological paradigm we are now entering, and the threat it poses to established theory and practice.

A range of stimulating ideas are put up for discussion: why not, for instance, embrace folksonomies rather than classification schemes and metadata schemas as the main means of resource discovery for unstructured data? Adopt a ranking system that encourages users to rate how useful they found content as part of the appraisal process? Let the content creator decide whether there should be any access restrictions on the content they have created?
This is a thought-provoking book which questions received wisdom and suggests radical new solutions to the very real issues RM faces. Every records manager needs to read this challenging book, and those that do may never think about their profession in quite the same way again.

I’ll post a few more details of the books central arguments over the next few weeks, but am happy to answer any specific individual questions directly.

Taxonomies: may be it is all a myth?

2008-03-05T08:49:00.003Z

Jim Connelly has published an article in this month’s RMS Bulletin, entitled ‘Functional taxonomies: myth or magic?’ Aside from the opening assumption that the birth of functional classification dates back to 2001 (odd, as I remember having lectures about it when studying for my Records Management Masters in 1997, and of course the first function-based JISC Study of the Records Lifecycle came out in 1999!), it’s an admirably succinct overview of the pros and cons of adopting either a functional, subject or organisation based approach to developing a corporate-wide schema.

The interesting thing from my perspective is that although the relative strengths and weaknesses of each of these different flavours of corporate-wide classification schemes is debated, there is no consideration given as to whether the notion of the classification scheme (of whatever hue) really is fit for purpose. I would argue that rather than just assuming the validity of corporate-wide classification schemes, we should, perhaps, be questioning whether they really meet the needs of our organisations now, and into the future.

For example, do we, in fact, kid ourselves that our classification schemes meet the needs of our users, who actually require a level of granularity far below that achieved by most classification schemes? Despite our best efforts, do records managers really understand the complex business processes which define our organisations (I speak as someone who started their career in the pharmaceutical industry and certainly never understood the intricacies of the drug development process)? Are classification schemes really comprehensive enough – especially function-based schemes - which may struggle to incorporate information which was not created as the result of one clearly defined process (e.g. photographs or even blogs). And, perhaps most significantly of all, how will we, on a practical level, be able to apply our corporate classification scheme to information and records being created and housed in a myriad of disparate, unconnected and externally hosted systems as we move further into a Web2.0 world.

The article suggests that it is ‘time to look at functional systems or schema objectively’. I would argue that it is time to cast the net even wider than that and, instead, to look at some of the fundamental assumptions on which all classification schemes are currently based.

New kids on the blog

2008-03-05T08:01:00.002Z

The state of records management blogging in the UK continues to go from strength to strength.

Not only do we have the welcome news that the RMS will be providing free WiFi access at their conference in Edinburgh and encouraging live event blogging; but also the arrival of a new blogger, in the form of Alan Bell's One man typing blog.

It's good to see so much thought and debate being shared during these exciting and demanding times for the records management profession.

Happy blogging!

How to keep those servers cool!

2008-01-30T16:21:00.000Z

There’s an interesting article in the latest edition of Government Computing magazine (unfortunately there is no e-version of the article to link to). The article in question is entitled ‘Greening the data centre’ and refers to the problems that organisations are encountering in terms of rising energy costs resulting from the ‘hot and hungry’ new blade servers that organisations are cramming into their data centres. According to the piece it is predicted that between 2000 and 2010 we will have "installed six times the amount of servers in our data centres and 69 times the amount of storage".

The problem is apparently that our data centre buildings are not designed to cope with the power required and heat generated by such machines, plus of course energy-consumption is now a political and ethical hot potato.

Now the interesting thing is the range of possible solutions outlined in the article. These vary from ‘better power management in data centres’, through to ‘taking your servers… and virtualising them’ or simply replacing old technology with new.

Nowhere does the rather obvious suggestion of ‘keeping less information’ get a look in. It would be interesting to know what percentage of the content of these steaming servers is actually still useful and still required? Of course the volume of information organisations create and need to retain is always increasing – but I bet there is still a huge percentage that could safely be destroyed if only anyone knew what it was, and whether it was still actually required…

But given that the main contributor to the piece is a Vice President at IBM perhaps its not that that surprising that the suggestion is to buy more kit, rather than to make better use of what exists already…

Blogging - whats it all about??

2008-01-28T13:34:00.001Z

Interesting to see a new records management blog appearing, with the launch of the new Records Management Society (RMS) blog. Seeing this, combined with recent experience from my own blog has prompted some thoughts about what blogs are for, what they do best and what perhaps they are less good at.

Take my previous post on this blog, for example, within which I attempted to summarise a very interesting and lively debate which had been occurring for several days on the records management JISCmail list, and to encourage the debate to continue. As one of the main protagonists of the debate I began to feel as though the email list was not the best forum for continuing the discussion, not least because we risked imposing a good number of messages on the entire membership of the list on what was a fairly niche subject. Transferring the debate to a blog seemed the obvious answer: the debate could continue, the comments would be displayed in a structured sequential order and only those interested would be affected.

The result? The debate was killed stone dead; not a single comment was received and this was after I even posted the first comment to keep the ball rolling and advertised its presence on the blog via the same list on which it had previously featured. Now of course it could just be that the discussion had come to a natural conclusion and interest had faded away, but this appears not to be the case. Firstly, a number of further emails were exchanged via the JISCmail list which kept the discussion very much alive for a few days afterwards, and secondly according to Google Analytics the blog posting in question received a fair number of hits (65) – its just that none of these led to further contributions.

I find this interesting, not because of this particular example but because of what it may imply regarding both the role of blogs in general and also user preferences when it comes to vehicles for debate.

It appears that despite a general despair about the quantity of emails sent and received it still seems the default mode of e-communication and perhaps will do so for far longer than we had envisaged. For whatever reason maybe reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated and despite a plethora of seemingly more sophisticated and interactive technologies its place is assured for some time to come. Perhaps its one of those rare examples of a piece of technology that hits a particular nerve and becomes so ingrained in the human psyche that people will continue to use it even when numerous and ‘better’ alternatives exist (the wrist watch being another example)

This also prompted me to consider why it is that I maintain this blog. Yes, user comments are a very welcome and important part of it, likewise the whole notion of encouraging and promoting debate within the profession. But if I am honest the reason for starting it and for continuing to maintain it is as an outlet for my own thoughts and views. I don’t claim them to be any more accurate or important than anyone else’s - I just wanted the means to be able to record them and to share them with whoever may find them of interest in a quicker and more responsive way than publishing journal articles or conference papers. If readers are sufficiently interested or otherwise stirred to comment on what I have said so much the better, but I shall continue to write whether the comments come in a flood, trickle or drought. Looking at the comment-to-posting ratio of other blogs I read I suspect that other bloggers feel much the same.

There is nothing particularly startling about the above, after all it reflects the origins of the blog as a Web-log. I suppose I could create and maintain my own full website and use that for the same purposes of online publishing but a blog enables me to leverage all the advantages but without the hassle and cost of hosting, designing & maintaining a full website; this leaves me free to just focus on writing what I want to say. It is, however, interesting that even organisations which already have existing sophisticated and informative vehicles for online dissemination via their websites still see the merit of maintaining a separate blog. It will be interesting to see over time which the average user prefers and whether it is actually the website rather than the email which is most affected by the rise of the blog…

An interesting debate on RM in the Web2.0 world...

2008-01-16T13:31:00.000Z

Readers of this blog might be interested in an impromptu debate which occurred yesterday on the Records-Management-UK email list. The discussion was kicked off by a seemingly innocuous email pointing out the availability of peripherals for laptops which enable broadband-speed wireless connection, even where there is no WiFi service available.

This soon led to an interesting cut and thrust regarding the relative merits of web2.0 and the role of records management in this regard (before moving onto a debate about how best to continue the debate!).

I thought it worth bringing the main trust of this discussion to the attention of those not on this particular list, whilst also providing one means for anyone interested to continue the debate without monopolising the list in question.

What follows may miss out one or two of the side-shoots of this discussion but hopefully captures the essence. It reads from top to bottom and I’ve kept the first names of the author of each message at the foot of the relevant message to enable the reader to keep track of the ‘to-ing and fro-ing’.

I’ve also responded to Peter’s last message through the blog’s comment facility…

Happy reading and my thanks to all those who contributed!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello all,
I’ve just had the following gizmo brought to my attention by a Business Information Systems colleague. Despite its irredeemably tacky name, it looks incredibly useful – essentially, a USB stick that gives full broadband access from your laptop wherever you are (once you have mobile phone network coverage).
http://www.carphonewarehouse.com/commerce/servlet/gben-server-PageServer?article=MAIN.UK.INTERNET.STATIC.USBMODEM

Two RM implications struck me at once:
(1) There is now absolutely no excuse for people working remotely to store data on hard drives or portable media devices, with all the data security and version control problems that attended those practices. Instead, organizational networks can be accessed directly through the broadband connection. No more ‘MI5 loses laptop with country’s entire defence network details in railway station café’ headlines!

(2) The possibilities opened up for managing electronic records in developing countries or remote regions with little or no reliable IT or land-based communication infrastructure. Ubiquitous mobile broadband access could now be coupled with web-hosted applications and storage to facilitate robust systems for managing electronic business records with minimal resources.

On the face of it, this is that rare thing in mobile communications technology over and beyond the basic ability to phone or text people – a truly useful development rather than a gimmick. But perhaps there are drawbacks I don’t know about. Has anyone out there actually used this device?

Regards,
Rachel.

This may well be a convenient way of delivering wireless access (in addition to all the existing ways) but it would not, for me, replace having files available to me locally. The speed of wireless, never mind unreliability and unavailability in many parts of the country does not provide the service I am looking for.

Regards
Jim

There may be truth in what you say for now, but I wonder how long this will remain the case? I suspect within the next 5 years or so the current limitations that you rightly point out will have disappeared and the advantages of online access to centrally held master copies will be seen to far outweigh the disadvantages. I always believe we should look at where the technology is likely to lead us in the near future, rather than feeling constrained by its current limitations. (its abit like a century ago saying ‘I’m sticking with my horse and cart, those automobile things are always breaking down and running out of fuel!!)

Andy is also right to point out that concentrating on wireless dongles and cards is probably bit of a technological cul-de-sac. I think Andy is right and it will be the gradual but relentless spread of ‘commercial’ wifi services to public spaces that makes the real difference. As I mention in my SoA paper, the role of wireless cards will probably be restricted to those more remote ‘rural’ locations where commercial factors don’t make a wifi service viable – so they in effect fill a temporary and ever-reducing gap in coverage.

Steve

Happy to play the luddite on this one. Don't share the general enthusiasm in respect of Web.2 and file storage heaven.

"Tough luck it's inevitable"? Yes, probably and certainly there's a need to address it - but I want to see 'rules' and that seems to fly in the face of what Web.2 offers - and its main attraction. (ie - unrestricted freedom)

No doubt rules will emerge retrospectively after something goes wrong. (they usually do) Don't ask me to speculate on what might go wrong (luddites don't have to) but once the imagination is given over to the ideas of Web.2 and Google storage, I find images from 'The Matrix' coming to mind!!!

Gerry

The problem is, it probably won’t make two hoots of difference whether we as records managers share the enthusiasm for web2.0 or not, the simple fact is that users do and we bury our heads in the sand at our peril. If records managers ruled the world (God, what a thought!) it might be different, but we have to acknowledge that when it comes to shaping the IT trends which are redefining our culture, society and economics (as well as our organisations) our opinions tend to count for virtually nothing. Saying we don’t approve and don’t endorse the technology might be one approach for us to take within our organisations, but pretty soon it is likely to be one that is soundly ignored by all and sundry.

Organisations do not come more traditional than the Royal Household and the Church of England and if both of those saw fit to use YouTube last year for their respective Christmas broadcasts I think we can be fairy certain that these technologies are now well and truly beyond the ‘techno-geek’ phase and here to stay…

List users interested in this subject might be interested to know that I have a book coming out in the summer: ‘Managing the crowd: rethinking records management for the Web2.0 world’ which explores these issues and the challenges it poses for records management in much more detail!

Cheers
Steve

Without being drawn into the wider Web 2.0 discussion (I’m not a luddite but perhaps in a long career I’ve experienced too many ‘next best things’ not to be a little skeptical about the extent to which ‘organisations are being re-shaped by it’), Steve’s final example hardly clinches the argument. They may appear traditional organisations, but both the Church of England and The Royal Household have very savvy media relations and publicity machines and would be looking to use all possible delivery mechanisms and outlets for their respective messages, including YouTube. I suspect there are just as many technogeeks in those organisations as in any other – though there are, inevitably, probably more in academia than in most other sectors. It would be more interesting to know that they kept the records relating to the planning, creation and production process in a Web 2.0 environment, or indeed their ‘record copy’ of the final broadcast.

Peter

Might be worth remembering that both email and the web owed their origins to the ‘technogeeks’ in academia too, but it didn’t seem to stop them spreading rather further than that…

Steve

True. But it’s also true that those particular tigers have created difficulties for corporate organisations which they have yet to solve (before moving on to the next best thing) and as PK suggested in his post they are now facing the cost. We need to distinguish between what works for individuals and what works for organisations. Where the individuals are employed by corporate bodies – we should stop calling them users and recognise that they are agents in this context – these two things may be incompatible. Individuals in the corporate context need information to do their job. The organisation needs records as evidence of what it has done, usually for a much longer period and long after the original ‘tagger’ has moved on. That requirement will not change. Technology on its own, no matter how clever and ubiquitous, is not going to meet this challenge and what we should be trying to do is to find ways of moderating the process – rules if you like to use Gerry’s word – so that we get the best of both worlds.

Peter

Someone at a conference I once spoke at made the very pertinent observation that "you don’t stop a bulldozer by standing in front of it, you stop it by getting behind the wheel"
On that basis, all I would say is that if we are going to continue to insist on taking a traditional rules-based ‘manual’ approach to the management of information we are (in the immortal words of Private Frasier) "Doomed, all doomed…"

Steve

They’re not manual world rules but rules that produce a desired outcome irrespective of the medium. You can’t get behind the wheel of the bulldozer unless you know how to drive it and then you need to know what it is that you’re going to flatten. Flattening everything because you can would hardly be the desired outcome.
A pedantic point – records and information are not inter-changeable terms.

Peter

At the risk of boring the rest of the RM world I think this had better be my last post on this particular topic…

But I just wanted to point out that my use of the term ‘information’ was quite deliberate in this context. Focusing on the (rapidly diminishing) percentage of an organisation’s information that fulfil our criteria as ‘records’ and ignoring the fate of the rest is not only career suicide, it is exposing our organisations to a considerable risk to their assets by ignoring the fact that a significant proportion of the information it holds may well be equally as important (and potentially as dangerous) as our records.

As a simple example you only have to consider the paradox of talking about ‘records management’ in the context of dealing with freedom of information to appreciate this point…. At the end of the day the recipient is usually only interested in the content, and that could equally appear in a piece of ‘information’ as in a record’. Likewise that content could be equally as incriminating for the organisation whether it be noted on a scrap of paper or within a formal record keeping system.

What is surely needed are ways of ‘scaling up’ the principles which lay behind records management to cope with the volume of information held by organisations, not reasons for ignoring the true scale of the problem

Over and out!

Steve

My last post too.

What is all this information that isn’t a record and where is it? Why does the organisation have it? Who created it? Is it supporting a business activity or is it just sitting there, waiting? Perhaps your definition of a record and records management is too narrow.

The FOI point conflates what the requester receives with its source. The fact remains that the public authority must turn first to its records to provide information about what it has done or plans to do. It may need to process the content to extract the information in a way that answers the question but that is a different issue. Similarly, those records still have to perform the continuing evidential task.

Steve, I look forward to your book where no doubt you will have the space to develop the proposed solutions as well as posing the questions. In the end the records still need to be identified and managed.

Peter

A records manager's review of 2007

2007-12-18T16:45:00.000Z

The following was my contribution to a review of the year which is being published by CILIP. This was featured in the December edition of Library & Information Update Volume 6 (12) and my thanks to them for allowing me to reproduce it here.

2007 might best be summarised as the year in which the first cracks began to appear in the records management profession’s love affair with EDRM (Electronic Document & Records Management) Systems. Certainly rather than representing the unquestioned goal for all records managers, regardless of their sector or circumstance, a growing and welcome sense of professional balance finally seems detectable. This was certainly a noticeable trend at the annual conferences of both the Records Management Society and Society of Archivists detectable both in a number of presentations and in delegate ‘chatter’ between sessions. The arrival this year on the scene of Microsoft Office Sharepoint 2007 may represent both part of the cause and effect of this change. It may not be perfect from the records manager’s perspective, but so far as the average IT or business manager is concerned it undoubtedly ticks enough of the boxes to make them think twice about additional investment in any other ‘specialist’ records management systems.

Unfortunately when you expose 'false gods' it is inevitable that a period of doubt and uncertainty follows and my feeling is that this will colour the prevailing mood within records management during 2008. If we can no longer automatically rely on an EDRMS as our default response and the panacea to cure all our ills where will this leave us? In particular do we have an answer to the questions raised by the phenomenal rise and rise of Web2.0? As with many other branches of information management, records management is still currently trying to come to terms with a new climate where content is king, quantity is valued over quality and ‘the masses’ are all powerful. If you think that sounds like the complete antithesis of traditional records management then you’d be right. 2008 looks like being a very interesting year indeed…

Merry Christmas everyone and I look foward to plenty more discussion next year!

Our invisible profession

2007-11-21T14:00:00.000Z

When a national incident such as an outbreak Foot & Mouth Disease occurs it is a sure bet that journalists and commentators will look to professionals such as vets, biologists and experts in disease control to explain what the problem is, what has gone wrong and what needs to be done to put it right. The same is true of virtually every other type of incident or accident you can imagine: from crash investigators and air traffic controllers after a mid-air collision; to surgeons after a series of botched operations.

Indeed for some professions it seems as though there presence is only ever recognised or given any consideration when a lapse or error by one of their number highlights the fact that they exist at all. I'm thinking here of the people who check the points on railway tracks, hospital cleaners or those responsible for checking machinery within a factory.

I mention this now because the overriding thought which struck me during the reporting of the loss of millions of child benefit records by the government was how invisible the records management profession seems to be in all of this. So far as I could see there was no 'records management experts' consulted by the media to explain what may have gone wrong, or what should have happened; nor even reference to the failure of records management as being a root cause.

In a story regarding just about the biggest and potentially most significant ever failure of records management in the UK the records management profession does not get a single mention, not one, neither as villain nor potential saviour; and that has to be a worry. Is our profile really that low? Is the true extent of our professional remit really that narrow and the impact of our actions really that negligible?

I hope not.

The future of the classification scheme

2007-11-16T16:16:00.000Z

Leafing through the November issue of the Records Management Society Bulletin I was struck by the fact that three of the major papers within it all related directly to issues around classification and the creation of classification schemes.

This may reflect nothing more than sheer coincidence or editorial grouping, but the reason why it struck me as significant is when viewed next to the content of Paul Duller’s editorial piece 'Through the looking glass' which raised many of the challenges posed by the introduction of Web2.0 that will be familiar to regular readers of this blog. Put simply, I’m just not sure how the two concepts will co-exist in the future (assuming predictions of the rise and rise of Web2.0, especially in the form of Office2.0 prove accurate).

In this world we could see users choosing to store their information on a range of unconnected, often externally hosted and media specific systems: be that Google Docs for text files, Flickr for photos or YouTube for video clips. Sure it is still possible for us to identify and even document the functions and processes which are creating this information, but we have nothing left to hang this on. There is no underlying architecture which we can mould into the shape of our classification schemes; no way of joining up the disparate pieces save in ways which are completely divorced from the process of creating the information in the first place.

One of the papers, 'Don’t build your house on sand' by Jeff Morelli finishes by describing a robustly created business classification scheme as a ‘solid foundation (which) guarantees the long term viability of their electronic records management programme’. Unfortunately I fear that the longevity of such schemes’ contents may well be fatally undermined by our inability to continue to apply them to the volume and diversity of information our users are creating and the technology they are using to create them.

A new perspective on email management?

2007-10-26T08:24:00.000+01:00

I’ve just returned from a stimulating couple of days at Julie Mcleod’s excellent Witness Seminar event on the management of e-communications. As with the first event in 2005 it bought together an interesting bunch of people to discuss a broad range of issues, this time associated with the management of email.

It would be impossible to try to summarise two days of excellent discussion in a single blog posting, so I won’t even try. Instead I thought I would focus on the reaction to my (unashamedly heretical) proposition that the answer to our problems with email is actually to keep it all. Given that this flies in the face of pretty much all accepted records management wisdom I wasn’t sure what reception this might get - especially as most of the first day’s debate had taken it for granted that our goal must be to find ways of applying accepted ‘good records management’ practice to email, such as mapping it against business processes, separating ‘email information’ from ‘email records’ and how to consistently apply retention management controls to separate the ‘wheat from the chaff’. But as it turned out a fair number of those presents seemed to agree that there might be some merit in this approach (with varying degrees of perfectly valid reservations).

So what prompted this tiny outburst of iconoclasm? Well, the more I think about it the more that the idea of taking a conscious business decision to keep all emails indefinitely (with a couple of important caveats) seems to make sense and for the following reasons:

1. It reflects the reality of the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. Rightly or wrongly we live a in a world where Yahoo now offers infinite storage capacity and many of its rivals as good as the same. This reflects a world where users are used to having all the information they have ever had at their fingertips in their domestic life and cannot comprehend why this shouldn’t also be the case at work. We need to accept that the information game is now about volume.

2. It acknowledges that senior managers would prefer to spend $1m per year on additional storage space than invest in efforts to appraise, sort and destroy emails. Why keep trying to promote a message that no one wants to hear?

3. It acknowledges that the intended but inevitable consequence of imposing caps on email storage and usage is force the user to squirrel their emails away in a dozen unofficial and local storage areas which makes legal discover far more time consuming and expensive than it need be

4. It solves at a stroke the seemingly insurmountable problems that records managers have been unable to solve for 3 decades regarding which emails are information and which are records

5. Unlike the process of selection and appraisal, which must always (by definition) be selective it is the only course of action which is entirely free from bias and the risk of disposing of the email which today seems trivial but would have been deemed gold dust by future generations.

6. It’s not as expensive as you might think. Sure storage is not free but as a fellow delegate pointed out after a few ‘back of an envelope’ calculations: the cost of storing last year’s email is probably around 1/10th of the cost of storing this years so it will always be a proportionately small cost to store previous years email.

7. It may encourage more responsible email use. The best way to discourage fraud, defamation, e-bullying, libel etc is for staff to be very aware that whatever they write will be added and retained as part of the corporate knowledge base.

The caveats? Well, we need to make our spam filters as effective as possible, focus on improving de-duplication to ensure we are only keeping one copy of each email and we need to specifically tag emails containing personal data to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act.

Okay so there will inevitably be a hundred other issues for us to resolve and still huge obstacles for us to navigate (not least how to ensure that our users can cope effectively with this volume of information). But we have to acknowledge that even after 30 years the contribution of records management to the management of email has so far been pretty negligible so maybe its time to start looking at this problem from a completely different perspective?

Retention by format, not content?

2007-10-04T14:19:00.000+01:00

It is one of the basic truisms of records management theory: that decisions regarding retention requirements are made based on their content and 'regardless of format'. This was an especially useful mantra a decade or so ago when some users would otherwise see the electronic version of a document as some alien construct, completely divorced from its paper counterpart.

Its still a mantra we cling to today and trot out as our first instinctive response, but its limitations are becoming more and more obvious, for example when it comes to email. Yes, its easy for us to say to our users that they must manage the contents of their inbox not as emails, but according to the content they contain but this is seldom reflected in reality. The simple fact is that the sheer volume of emails faced by users makes this virtually impossible to achieve and the majority of decisions taken regarding the fate of email are either taken on an individual ad hoc basis ("I don't think I need this any more") or en masse ("I've run out of space allocation so lets delete all last year's emails/all emails with large attachments etc").

The news that UK phone companies are now bound by law to retain information about all telephone calls and text messages for one year sounds a further death knell in the practicality of the 'regardless of format' concept. Even though this data might be used for one of three levels of enquiry the decision has been made that all such information must be retained for the same period: regardless of content, subject or any other criteria. If its information about a phone call it is kept for 1 year - and that is retention based purely on format and 'regardless of content'.

Feedback on the rise of Web2.0 and the need to develop Records Management2.0

2007-09-26T16:40:00.000+01:00

I gave a repeat performance in London yesterday of my paper on the challenges to traditional records management posed by the rise of Web/Office2.0 and the need for us to develop radical new approaches to solving them. I allowed a good amount of time for discussion at the end of my paper and received some interesting and varied comments.

It’s difficult to recall and summarise every comment made, so my apologies to any of those who attended who feel I may have missed or misconstrued anything vital in the following.

Some (a minority I would guess) agreed whole-heartedly that this was a challenge that was definitely heading our way soon and agreed that we needed to be thinking along the kind of radical lines I was advocating (ie using the wisdom of the crowd to help manage the crowd in the way I outlined in Option 4 of my paper).

On the journey home I reflected that most of the other comments focused around two other main view points:

1. ‘This won’t affect my organisation’. This was because senior management in the public sector distrust any external agencies and would therefore never allow their information to be stored and managed by 3rd parties. In addition some of those present from the private sector felt their current policy framework which forbids use of non-corporate systems and claims corporate ownership of staff outputs would be enough to keep this at bay (effectively a combination of both Option 1 and 2 of my original four options)

2. ‘This will be someone else’s problem to deal with’. Interestingly one person in the audience already used online collaborative tools when working on projects with colleagues from other organisations, but felt that as she then ensured that the final record was captured in her organisational system that this largely neutralised the problem. If all staff are taught to do likewise we could therefore take advantage of the benefits, whilst circumventing the problems of managing this stuff as records (Also covered by ‘Option 2’ of my four options).

In addition others felt that it was down to our IT colleagues to provide a solution, a popular choice being for them to develop their own ‘in-house’ alternatives to external Web2.0 solutions which can then be safely rolled out within the organisation (‘Option 3’ of my four options!).

Personally and as stated in my original paper I do have severe doubts regarding the wisdom of relying on any of Option 1,2, or 3. In fact by the time I had read the newspaper on the journey home and opened up Google on my PC I had already found enough reasons why I feel these approaches are doomed to failure.

In response to the first scenario: make no mistake, regardless of the sector you work in I guarantee that your organisation will be affected by the implications of staff using Web/Office2.0 within the next two years. If in doubt, take a look at the range of organisations who have already signed up to use Google Apps including leading multi-national private companies, universities and even government departments. I also recalled Euan Semple’s keynote speech at this years RMS conference where he confidently predicted a world in the near future where the best and brightest young talent in the workforce would expect access to such sites as a basic human right and would refuse to join any organisation that denied them this.

As for the suspicion of senior management in the public sector to trust such sites, yesterday’s London Evening Standard included an article about the British Foreign Secretary, David Milliband: “asked if he intended to join the social networking Facebook craze, Mr Milliband said: ‘Eventually…" Now this might just be a case of a politician trying to appear in touch, but come election time you can guarantee a whole raft of MPs and potential MPs will be using just such systems to reach out to young voters. This could never be achieved by them creating their own version of Facebook (I can’t see HousesofParliamentBook being a big social hit somehow) which means I fear for this reason and many others that just leaving it to IT to produce officially endorsed versions of such systems for internal consumption is also a short-sighed approach. Its also one which suggests that we as records managers should restrict our sphere of influence to just managing the records and systems we already have (another suggestion made yesterday and one which to me seems like committing professional suicide)

One of the best quotes I heard at the conference yesterday came in conversation over lunch and summed up the situation perfectly: ‘You can’t stop a bulldozer by standing in front of it; the only way is to get behind the wheel and control it from there’. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

.

Two very different visions of the records management future

2007-09-19T16:58:00.000+01:00

The latest edition of the Records Management Society Bulletin publication includes a lead article by Frank McKenna, CEO of Knowledgeone Corporation entitled ‘Technology as a tool: where is records and document management heading?'.

This is without doubt a far reaching piece which covers a wide spread of the technical developments likely to influence records management in the near future. These range from improved WiFi Services and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology to wearable and even implanted computers. The amazing thing about this piece is that despite this radical depiction of a world transformed by technology the only unquestioned constant for the author appears to be the presence and continued central importance of an EDRMS (Electronic Document & Records Management System).

For each and every new technology mentioned McKenna discusses its likely impact not in terms of how it may fundamentally change user behaviour or the way our organisations' function (and therefore create records) but in what it may or may not mean for the development of the EDRMS. The following couple of quotes probably encapsulate this as well as anything – though there are plenty of others that could have been chosen:

“Better programming tools and techniques (.NET, SOA, PHP, AHA, Ajax, etc): Most of these make it easier and faster for IT people to roll out and support EDRMS solutions”

Or better still:

"As far as EDRMS solutions go I don’t really see records and information managers rushing out to get (micro) ‘chipped’, at least not within the next 10 years. After that who knows…”

Its almost as if EDRMS have become a kind of professional oxygen for us – our imaginations can foresee and invent all manner of wild, exciting and improbable futures which might await us, but apparently the one unquestioned and unchallenged constant within each of these brave new worlds, just like the air we must always breathe, is the EDRMS.

Contrast this rather disjointed vision of the future with Jesse Wilkins excellent blogging from the recent Office2.0 conference in San Francisco. No prior assumptions, no sacred cows – just matter-of-fact observations about the fundamental changes that are occurring in technology as we speak and what they may mean for information and records management.

Beginning the Records Management 2.0 journey

2007-09-04T08:13:00.000+01:00

I mentioned in an earlier posting that the time would soon come when we need to move beyond identifying the problems facing the future of records management and to start the process of defining possible solutions.

The presentation that I gave last week to the Society of Archivist’s Annual General Conference in Belfast tried to take the first small and faltering steps in this direction by defining the four possible approaches to addressing the challenges posed by the rise of Web2.0 and Office2.0 which I would argue are open to the records management profession.

In summary I believe these four available options to be:
1. Ban all use
2. Rely on a policy framework
3. Enterprise Content Management
4. Records Management2.0

Further details on each can be found within the full text of my presentation now available via Slideshare (you will need to download the presentation rather than just view online as the full script is contained within the 'Notes' pane of each slide).

Naturally this is only the beginning of what will be a long and complex journey and one which will inevitably include many wrong turns, dead-ends and head scratching along the way. But it at least it promises to be an interesting trip! For anyone interested in hearing an expanded version of this paper, plus the opportunity to discuss the four options you might be interested to know that I shall be presenting another session on this topic at the forthcoming Unicom 'Records Management Update' conference in London on September 25th.

Beyond compliance - the future of records managment

2007-08-22T11:37:00.000+01:00

Update the journal of CILIP has published an article of mine in their latest edition entitled 'Beyond compliance - the future of records management' as its cover story.

The paper looks at the compliance-based origins of records management and how we may struggle to fulfil this core objective in the future unless we are willing to see the limitations inherent in current practice.

As ever all thoughts and comments are welcome...

JISC infoNet Innovation in Records Management Award

2007-08-21T15:01:00.000+01:00

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my concerns that despite its growth in recent years, the records management profession seems to have lost some of its desire to innovate and to find new solutions to both old and new problems.

It was partially to help recognise, reward and encourage those bucking this trend in the UK Higher and Further Education sectors that JISC infoNet have today announced the launch of the inaugral JISC infoNet Innovation in Records & Information Award sponsored by Facet Publishing.

We also hope that this award and especially the intention to make publicly available the content of the nominations we receive may itself play a small part in helping to stimulate further research and development in the future.

If you and your project meet the criteria we look forward to receiving your nomination!!

Records Management Witness Seminar

2007-08-16T08:54:00.000+01:00

Readers of ths blog may well be interested in an event being run in Newcastle this October. This is the second time Professor Julie McLeod has run a Records Management Witness Seminar, the first being one of the most innovative and stimulating records management events I have been part of. This second event, focused around email and e-communications looks equally as interesting.

2nd Northumbria University Witness Seminar Conference

Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications
Exploring strategies with Experts
at
St James Park, Newcastle upon Tyne
24-25th October 2007

"Email has transformed business but it can be a nightmare" … and instant messaging, skype etc are set to do the same thing! But are we successfully managing the information created by these technologies?

Join a group of records management, IT, management and legal experts, from the UK, Australia & Canada abroad, and engage in the exploration of key issues for managing records from email and other e-communications technologies. Contribute your own knowledge and experience to the debate as we examine:

· the business perspective - what are the records management implications & challenges of doing business electronically?
· the people perspective – are people the problem and the solution?
· the technology perspective - problem or panacea?
· moving forward – futurewatch.

If you want to develop a strategy for tackling email and position your organisation to manage its records in today’s highly distributed, mobile environment then this is the event for you.

The one and a half-day conference builds on the success of our first ‘witness seminar conference’ in May 2006. The three ‘witness seminars’ and a panel discussion offer a rare opportunity for anyone interested and/or involved in managing their organisation’s email/e-communications records to listen, learn from, actively discuss and network with a broad range of experts and other delegates.

‘Witnesses’ include: Steve Bailey, David Bowen, a partner form Crutes Law Firm, Adrian Cunningham (National Archives of Australia), Jonathan Downes, Ishbel Duncan, Catherine Hare, Mike Huberty, Heather Jack, John McDonald (Canada), Michael Moss, Martin Sanderson, Zoe Smyth, David Wainwright, Geoff Walker, Teresa Waring, Ian Wooler.

The conference fee is £300 (includes lunch and refreshments both days, an evening event at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and conference proceedings on publication). For booking and detailed information of the event, which is being sponsored by Iron Mountain (UK) Ltd and Emerald Publishing, please visit the conference website at www.northumbria.ac.uk/rmwitness07

Early booking is advisable as places are limited to 50 delegates.

Defining 'Records Management 2.0'

2007-08-03T09:57:00.000+01:00

In a previous post I mentioned that I am speaking on the subject of the need for Records Management2.0 in response to the changes we are seeing in the use of ICT thanks to Web2.0. Well my thoughts on this same concept and why I believe it is now required are also described in an article and Podcast for the lastest JISC Inform magazine.

As readers of this blog will know I have written and presented fairly extensively over recent months on the challenges posed by the rise of Web2.0 and Office2.0 and why I believe the records management profession needs to address them. What I plan to do now is to start to move beyond this - after all, it's no good just repeating that we have a problem unless we then start to work out what we might do about it! I certainly wouldn't claim to have all the answers, or even to yet fully understand all the questions but as the classic saying goes ' the journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step' - so I guess it is time to lace up the boots.

For me the journey starts in Belfast with a paper at the end of this month at the Society of Archivist's Annual Conference where I hope to map out some of the main themes and approaches open to us. I'll be making the content of this paper available online afterwards so will provide a link to it in due course. In the meantime it would be great to hear the thoughts of others as to how records management may adapt to meet these challenges, or indeed if you disagree with the need to reinvent it at all!

First chink in the armour of Office2.0?

2007-07-24T16:17:00.001+01:00

I was interested to read an email sent to me and all other users of the spresent web2.0 presentation application promoting a new version of the product - Spresent WinTonic. According to the product blurb this version (for which there is an annual licence fee as opposed to the free version I currently use) is 'spresent for windows'. The rationale for this development is, according to their FAQs, because of notebook computers and the fact that "Notebooks are not always connected to the Web, so having Spresent installed on computer would allow to work on presentations at any time"

Several thoughts as to what this might imply spring to mind. On the one hand it could just be viewed as the developers simply plugging an obvious gap in their product and thus helping to improve the user experience, which in turn is likely to increase take-up of such services.

However, I also suspect another by-product of this kind of thing will be to further blur the distinction between a user's desktop and their online activities - further adding to management complexity. I haven't seen any information about how it handles online/offline version control and synchronisation and would be interested to see how this works and what sort of 'footprint' is left behind on the user's machine.

But could it also be that the release of this product is recognition that most people are not yet ready to take the leap into a fully online existence? After all taking a fully online, zero-footprint, web2.0 application and then sticking a little bit of it back on the client desktop does seem like abit of a 'one step forward, two steps back' moment in the overall evolution of web/office 2.0.

'Records Management Update' Conference

2007-07-17T16:35:00.000+01:00

Readers of this blog might be interested in attending a one day seminar being held in London on 25th September. Its a Records Management Update seminar and promises a varied and interesting looking programme exploring many of the themes covered within this blog.

My own contribution on the day will be to present a session which asks 'Is it time for records management 2.0'

Hoep to see you there!

Further information and booking details are available from www.unicom.co.uk/recordsmanagement

Archivists as "Data Storage Specialists"

2007-07-11T08:12:00.000+01:00

I was interested to read a letter from my old colleague, David Ryan, published in that 'Bible' of the IT industry Computer Weekly a couple of weeks ago. David's letter serves to remind both the IT industry, and perhaps equally importantly we as professional archivists and records managers, that our professional skills in data storage are greatly - an increasingly - needed in the digital world. The question is, why aren't we better at promoting ourselves in this way and what can we as a profession do to address this?

David's letter is reproduced in full below.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Sir,

Re: Storage Reports in Computer Weekly, 22 May 2007

Having been a qualified Archivist, and therefore, a Data Storage Specialist, for over twenty years, I was bemused at your recent reports on the alleged lack of career definition in data storage and the legal issues surrounding storage. I have been within the last decade Head of Information Management for a major pharmaceutical company and more recently, Head of Digital Preservation at the UK National Archives, where I designed the PRONOM file format recognition system and, with colleagues, built TNA's Digital Archive.

I, like many other archivists, have written on the topic on data retention. In 1997, ten years ago, the Records Management Journal published an article by Steve Bailey and myself on the uses of a retention schedule database. This was based on practical experience. It may be useful for your readers who are dealing with the ever growing volume of data their organisations produce, to consult not only their in-house counsel but their local Records Manager or alternatively, seek advice from the Records Management Society or Society of Archivists. The members of these two bodies are dealing with the selection of data for long term storage in all formats on a rational basis every day of their working lives.

David Ryan

Digital preservation & the Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

2007-07-04T15:21:00.000+01:00

An interesting press announcement from The National Archives today regarding a new arrangement with Microsoft which allows TNA to take advantage of the Microsoft Virtual PC for preservation purposes.

It seems as though this may well represent a very useful way forward for dealing with stand alone or simple OLE (Object Linking & Embedding) MS Office files. Such content certainly represents a large proportion of many organisation's digital holdings so this looks like a promising development.

Of course the Microsoft Virtual PC will not provide an environment for being able to access any of the countless examples of non-MS file formats and systems that exist ranging from CAD packages to multi-media files - nor will it be an answer for how to access content stored in databases of long forgotten and unsupported formats. I've also been reliably informed that there might be some additional complexities when trying to accurately render Exchange/Outlook files, but it is a start nonetheless.

What was also interesting was the comments Natalie Ceeney made on Radio 4 today to accompany this announcement. As well as drawing on the classic cause celebre such as the varying fortunes of the Domesday Books of 1066 & 1986 she pointed out how the issues of digital prevation now mean much more to the ordinary person in the street thanks to the range of digital sources people now rely on in their every day lives. Perhaps a few crashed hard drives and lost digital photos will help get the bigger message across where previous attempts have largely failed...

Google providing University email services (and more)

2007-06-13T17:03:00.000+01:00

I suspect some in the UK records management community will have read my previous postings regarding the rise and rise of Office2.0 and its inevitable impact on records management with a certain amount of disbelief.

For those of us working in the higher education sector that future is already here. If you don’t believe me take a look at this story on the BBC website about Trinity College Dublin’s decision to outsource its student email service to Google.

And that is only the tip of the iceberg as the following quote from the same article illustrates:

“The offer to higher education also includes free online tools, hosted by Google, which allow students to work on files from any internet-connected computer, on campus, at home or anywhere else.”

That’s right; Google won’t just be hosting all student and staff emails, but potentially all the documents, spreadsheets and other files students create as well.

No more storage costs, no need for resource-driven retention management, no need for classification schemes, file plans or thesauri, no need for back-ups and disaster recovery...

Okay so we as records managers might disagree with the validity of some or all of the above statements, but you can bet your bottom dollar that this is exactly what senior managers are thinking.

The business case for an institutional EDRM system just got a lot harder to sell...

JISC Web2.0 for teaching and learning report

2007-06-11T15:31:00.000+01:00

A very interesting report has recently been published by JISC. Web2.0 for content for teaching and learning in Higher Education by Tom Franklyn and Mark van Harmelen makes many interesting observations and though (as the title would suggest) focusing on the teaching and learning world has much to interest those concerned with the impact of web2.0 on administrative systems and processes. Indeed I would be very interested to see a sister report produced on just this area.

One of the key issues addressed by this report is the pros and cons of an institution developing their own brand 'official' versions of web2.0 applications for use by their staff and students' versus allowing use of externally provided commercial systems. As the report itself makes clear there are certainly advantages to the first route and this is likely, I suspect, to be the favoured option with records managers: not least because of the potential it provides to impose a greater degree of control over this space. It may not be the kind of micro level of control we are used to aiming for, but could at least provide the means of designing applications with certain records management functionality built within it (bearing in mind the need to retain the kind of 'light touch approach in the use of regulations that might constrain experimentation' advocated by Franklyn and van Harmelen).

The question is, however, whether it will prove possible to keep the genie of commercial systems in the bottle and whether institutions will be sufficiently able to pace with the sophistication and functionality required to satisfy user demand. Or whether as a consequence of resource issues and the slower nature of development within large organisations they will forever be playing catch up and trying to enforce use of systems which look obsolete as soon as they are launched. In fact the report provides its own evidence of the liklihood of this occuring with references to the fact that no institutions have attempted to develop their own instant messenger system thanks to the success of MSN, Skype etc...

It is also questionable whether this approach takes sufficent notice of the increasing breakdown of work/leisure use of IT that seems to be taking place. Put simply the student with a passion for photography who has used Flickr at home to build up a large portfolio of images is more likely to want to continue to use Flickr for any images they produce as part of their formal coursework, than the university 'own brand' system.

Lastly, the report also comments on the difficulty of managing version control, audit trails and ensuring the longterm preservation of web2.0 content. Further evidence of how the need for the fundamental principles of records management continue to be relevant regardless of technological innovation - it's just how we achieve them that needs to be reconsidered.

Records vs Information

2007-06-07T09:57:00.000+01:00

Not surprisingly there has been abit of debate sparked by some of my earlier posts about the whole records vs information/knowledge debate.

Of course one answer to this whole ‘march of web2.0’ debate might be to take refuge in the fact that by and large the content created by such systems do not represent business records and therefore are not our problem.

As records managers we have traditionally been in the fortunate position of only dealing with a small proportion of the information created by an organisation: that which fulfils the criteria of a ‘record’. Could we not just dismiss the vast majority of the outputs of Web2.0 applications and services as mere ‘information’ and leave it to its own devices? In theory I guess we could, but my strong feeling is that we shouldn’t.

Firstly, I would point to the fact that the traditional divisions between records and information are beginning to become less clear cut and of less relevance than they once were. An example? Consider the Freedom of Information Act. It is just that – a freedom of information act. It makes no distinction between whether the text is held within the context of a formal business record or on the back of a fag packet. Both are covered by the same conditions and both may well be treated as being of equal significance by the recipient.

Secondly, it can act as a distraction to the main issues. Look at email, we spent (and still sometimes spend) a great deal of time and intellectual effort trying to determine whether an email did or didn’t count as a record instead of just trying to work out how to manage the damn things.

Thirdly, unless we start to cast our professional net as wide as possible we risk becoming less and less relevant to our organisations. Let me illustrate what I mean with some spurious statistics but ones which will hopefully explain my point. Forty years ago in the days of typing pools, formal registry systems and memos the percentage of an organisation’s information that we would acknowledge to be ‘records’ may have been around 80-90%. Twenty years ago with the birth of the PC this may have dropped to 60% (as the amount of informal drafts and ‘documents’ etc increased). Ten years ago with the birth of email, rise of relational databases etc the percentage of the total information within our organisations that we considered to be within our professional remit may have dropped to 30%. Now with the exponential rise in information being created with terabytes of research data, geo-spatial data, image files, multi-media files etc our records management programmes may only be covering less than 5% of our total information holdings.

Now you and I may know that not all information is equal and that our 5% is actually the most important – but is that something widely understood by the rest of the organisation? There is a very real risk that senior management might start to look at this from a risk management perspective: ‘okay, so I know that your tiny percentage of ‘records’ are more important than some of this other stuff, but getting value out of the other 95% of our information (the stuff that represents our intellectual capital) is a far bigger priority which adds value and promises a return on investment. I’ll spend my money there and take the risk thanks…."

Where the challenge (and the opportunity) now exists is in the fact that this other 95% of the information we hold does needs many of the management and governance controls that form the basis of records management to be applied to it. The trick for us is to work out which bits and most importantly how given the radically different environment in which this needs to operate.

Digital Repositories - getting to grips with the same issues

2007-06-05T17:24:00.001+01:00

I have been an interested observer of the world of digital repositories for the past couple of years. Not least because of the multi-million pound investment from JISC and others into this area to create repositories which whilst not necessarily records management systems ('all records management systems are repositories, but not all repositories are records management systems' - discuss!) are clearly very associated with them and the objectives of records management. I have had, and indeed continue to have, many interesting discussions with colleagues more closely involved in this area regarding the degree of overlap between these two agendas and the need to join the communities of practice for mutual benefit. As the scope of these repositories begins to widen from 'white' and 'grey' literature (i.e. published and non-published research papers) towards housing things like research grant applications, minutes of meetings and other 'corporate records' so the opportunities (and risks) of cross-over or lack of increase further.

By their own admission the respository community is beginning to struggle to know how best to tackle issues such as the need for version control and tracking audit trails. Records managers have a great deal to offer here in terms of our experience in these issues - I just hope that within institutions that expertise is being tapped into.

However, what struck me having attended the first day of the JISC Dealing with the Data Deluge workshop in Manchester today is an even more fascinating parallel between the two agendas.

Those responsible for implementing and maintaining institutional repositories are beginning to notice exactly the same impact from the rise of Web2.0 as I have been predicting for records management. They are beginning to notice that users are turning away from the structured, formal, well managed official repository and are instead turning to 'quick and dirty' services offered by externally hosted services - and in particular to those services that people are using in their lives outside work such as Flickr etc.

The keynote speaker, Andy Powell from Eduserv advocated viewing repositories as just another web resource (as this is the way in which users do), rather than from the system architecture perspective to make sure that we start asking ourselves the right questions. That way we might start to understand what makes these web2.0 systems so attractive to users and to learn lessons from this. Andy's presentation will soon be available from slideshare but wasn't up yet at the time of writing this. Incidently, posting it on slideshare is of course just another example of how an online service is being used right here and now to store and manage a record folks...

So the repositories community are today facing what we as records managers will have to face tomorrow. The approved institutional repository may be a carefully designed, well structured and tightly managed system which adheres to best practice and adopts standard metadata but the signs are that this is not what the user wants. They want something looser and more free. Something with less boundaries and walls that enable them to reuse their material. They want to be able to call it whatever they and their community want to and to access it wherever they are, unfettered by constraint. They want to be able to find it in Google and share it with who ever they choose and if the formal systems being imposed on them can't deliver this - there are a host of online services out there which will...

The rise and rise of Office 2.0

2007-06-01T08:41:00.000+01:00

Continuing on the theme of my last post about the demise of enterprise architectures & the rise of emergent systems.

One of the greatest challenges we as information managers will soon face is the increasing use by staff of externally provided online business applications. I mentioned a few examples of social software that falls into this category such as Facebook, what I didn't mention was the whole Office 2.0 movement.

Those in the vanguard of this movement foresee the day in the very near future where a user's PC need contain nothing more than a web browser: no applications, no content files. Just a browser. Far fetched? Take a look at this site for a fascinating glimpse not only of the incredible range of Office 2.0 applications already out there, but also of how one user is beginning to pull them together to operate in a purely online realm.

Of course the draw back of 100% reliance on online applications is that without a connection to the internet you are unable to do anything. Now this is less of a problem than it was even a couple of years ago thanks to high speed domestic broadband and the ever increasing spread of wireless hotspots around our towns and cities but there are undoubtedly still gaps in provision (I can testify to this living in rural Herefordshire!).

Now those good folks at Google appear to be actively addressing the issues raised by the online/offline gap with a product called Google Gears which will allow offline access of web resources and applications by caching them on a user's drive and then automatically synchronising when they are back on line. Interestingly the Guardian article this morning specifically comments on the potential this development could have for bringing Google closer into competition with Microsoft when it comes to business applications claiming:

Docs - which incorporates word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs - works only with an active internet connection. Allowing it to operate on a computer's hard drive would bring it into competition with the dominant Microsoft Office brand and mark the latest step in Google's slow but inexorable invasion of the Seattle-based software company's territory.

Lets think about this from the Records Manager's perspective. We may moan about Microsoft and we may complain that users never store documents in the right place on the network - but at least they are using our version of the software and storing their information on our network. The user will soon be in a position to cut out the middleman (ie the corporate structure and records management) completely.

Try selling a clunky, restrictive EDRM system to a user or a project team who can save what they want where they want and share it with who they want via Google Docs or whatever other provider takes their fancy...

Of course we could just ban our staff from using such technology and insist they use the corporate systems provided. Indeed I am sure many will take this approach at first (with varying degrees of success) but I strongly suspect we will only be able to hold back the waves for so long. Rather than pretending it doesn't exist and hoping it will go away, we might be advised to start seriously thinking about what this will mean for records management and what role (if any) it has to play in this new world.

The end of the Records Manager as 'Philosopher King'?

2007-05-30T15:03:00.000+01:00

Colleagues who attended the Gartner Symposium IT XPO in Barcelona brought back some fascinating stuff. Not least of which was the text of a presentation by Brian Burke a research analyst at Garter entitled Architecting for Emergence: New Game, New Rules. His paper charts the decline of the hierarchical, structured enterprise architecture and what we are now seeing in terms of its replacement by emergent systems.

I won't attempt to summarise his entire paper, but the following quote perhaps gives a pretty clear flavour of the crux of his argument:

"increasingly technology is becoming the catalyst for emergent behaviour where individuals motivated by differing goals interact to create a higher level of intelligence without the benefits of hierarchical structure. In all these structures there are clear rules that limit behaviour but do not dictate evolution"

At the outset of his paper he makes the historical comparison between Plato's concept of 'Philosopher Kings' (highly educated & solely possessed of the ability to understand abstract representations of classes of object) and enterprise architects. Plato believed the ruling class of Philosopher Kings to be an integral part of the way in which a belevolent dicatatorship functions. Burke argues that the modern enterprise is a belevolent dictatorship and that imposing such a centralised 'command and control' structure on its workers stiffles creativity and innovation and severely limits effective decision making.

To my mind Records Managers can equally be described as Philosopher Kings with the same penchant for imposing as many structures, restraints and rules on users as it possibly can. This may be for what we would argue are sound and justified reasons, but this does not lessen the burden it places on users, nor the resentment it causes.

Nor, and here is the really important part, is it scalable. We are living in an exponential age where information is now measured in terabytes and users are beginning to make increasing use of a plethora of systems to create and manipulate information. Furthermore, many of these systems are now hosted and made available by external service providers and are rapidly beginning to take over the role once performed by 'corporate' systems (for example academics preferring to use Facebook to contact their students, rather than the institutional Virtual Learning Environment or using Flickr to store photographs rather than an institutional repository).

Old style 'command and control' records management can't cope with this. What weight will arguments about retention management to save resources have when Google and others are promising to host all of your documents for ever for free? Besides, how are users supposed to apply series-level retention schedules and micro-appraise such vast volumes of data? Most of the assumptions on which the theory is based no longer apply. Equally it is futile to think the best solution is simply to ban staff from using such systems and naive to think it will never affect the organisation you work for, regardless of the sector it is in. Emergent systems and Web 2.0 are here to stay. If records management wants to remain relevant we are going to have to rethink our existing role as an enthusiastic part of the benevolent dictatorship and start considering how we can continue to play an important and meaningful role in the mangement of information in a very different future.

"Why I prefer hardcopy" - bizarre...

2007-05-15T16:37:00.000+01:00

I've just finished reading one of the most bizarre articles to appear in the RMS Bulletin for many a year. It is entitled 'Why I prefer hardcopy' and is by Katrina Hughes. It first appeared in Freepint and is well worth a read for its novelty value.

It really does have some odd statements in it, such as "if you do not have the computer resources to print something out, only one person can look at an electronic document at a time". Now I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at how many people are looking at the BBC website simultaneously but I wouldn't mind betting its more than one.

She also makes some rather strange remarks about the portability of paper over electronic documents. Okay, so it might be easier to read one page of paper on a bus than open your laptop but its hardly a scalable argument. New drug submissions to the FDA used to take up several lorries worth of paper. Not surprisingly they now ask for them on CD ROM...

Finally (and it was at this point I really lost the will to live) she claims that hardcopy is better because it is so much easier to find than electronic copies, noting that "when you download a document from the internet... sometimes the name of the file doesn't match the title of the document. Inevitably, the file name contains numbers and letters that jumble into a code that may even include non-alpha-numeric characters. I have difficulty finding documents I just downloaded."

Now would you like to tell this worker in the "information industry" about how to rename a document, or shall I?.....

For a far more interesting glimpse of how the worlds of paper and electronic media are converging take a look at Xerox's plans for a new printing technology which does not require ink and results in reusable electronic paper...

Changing attitudes towards EDRMS?

2007-05-08T16:50:00.000+01:00

To my mind there was a noticable, and welcome, sign of changing attitudes towards EDRMS (Electronic Document & Records Management Systems) at this years RMS Annual Conference in Brighton last week.

Previous years have seen a virtual total dominance of the conference agenda by EDRMS, either through vendors demonstrating them, consultants advising on implementing them, or practitioners explaining what they have done/would like to do with them. Even when a session was not about EDRM the implicit assumption throughout would always be that this was still the only goal in town.

Okay so this year's programme still saw more than its fair share of EDRM-focused sessions, particularly on day 2, but to my mind there was more than a whiff of the rear guard action about some of what was said. Having heard an excellent presentation on day 1 from Euan Semple about the challenges posed by Web 2.0 and social software presenters seemed to be working hard to try to demonstrate how developing an EDRM is still the answer to such changing and challenging times.

This was echoed by the flavour of many of the conversations I either had or overheard between sessions. More than one delegate expressed the view that they no longer believed EDRM was the answer (something rarely if ever heard even as recently as last year). The trouble appears to be that whilst people may have fallen out of love with the idea of EDRM they do not know what other options to pursue.

Why this is and where this might leave us is a theme to return to another day...