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...
Showing posts with label HCI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HCI. Show all posts
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Monday, 23 May 2011
Its the user, stupid
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.
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.
Monday, 6 December 2010
Records management: the plasterer's hammer?
“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…
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…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)