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.
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
Friday, 16 November 2007
The future of the classification scheme
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.
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.
Friday, 26 October 2007
A new perspective on email management?
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?
Thursday, 4 October 2007
Retention by format, not content?
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'.
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'.
Wednesday, 26 September 2007
Feedback on the rise of Web2.0 and the need to develop Records Management2.0
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.
.
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.
.
Wednesday, 19 September 2007
Two very different visions of the records management future
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.
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.
Tuesday, 4 September 2007
Beginning the Records Management 2.0 journey
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
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.
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