Encouraging user participation in RM projects

Its been a recurring theme of mine for the last couple of years now that records management needs to find better ways of connecting with users; of thinking a little less about ‘the organisation’ and a little more about ‘the individual’.  For without the support and enthusiasm of those on the ground even the most ambitious and robust of RM implementations is pretty well doomed to failure. 

Human Computer Interaction and User Centred Design based approaches certainly have a great deal of potential in this regard and the more I have researched these areas the more convinced I become that we need to find ways to bring such techniques more fully into the RM canon.  It would certainly be interesting to know just how many EDRM/ERM systems have ever undergone any robust, independent usability testing.  The change in tack from some vendors away from the “our product integrates ‘seamlessly’ with your users desktop” message of the past to the “our product integrates seamlessly with Sharepoint so your users never even know its there” message of today suggests a certain recognition that this was largely a battle lost.

I suspect many of those involved in RM projects might protest that user consultation and engagement has been an important facet of their projects.  Focus groups, ‘model offices’, and user representatives on project teams are all well established mechanisms for ensuring the user voice isn’t lost.  But how effective are they?  Are these channels which really proactively encourage free thought and honest reflection, or are they (perhaps subconsciously) designed to only produce a narrow range of responses with most of the important decisions already made: more a question of ‘Which user interface do you like best: A, B, or C’ than ‘What could we do to improve your access to the information you need to do your job more easily’?  Whereas the former already assumes a new interface is needed, whether the user likes it or not; the latter makes no such assumptions and could elicit a broad spectrum of ideas that go far beyond changes to a system interface.

As part of my role at JISC infoNet I’ve been increasingly engaged with participatory techniques and stringing these together to run participatory workshops.  These are simple, creative exercises that are designed to get groups of people working together, raising issues, sharing ideas and forming a consensus.  They are the polar opposite of most of the workshops I’ve ever encountered in terms of the energy and enthusiasm they generate and the results they generate.  Just this week we’ve released an online guide to how to conduct such an event through our Planning a participatory workshop infoKit.

We’ve been using these techniques extensively with project teams, College leadership teams and internally within our own team for over a year now and I increasingly think they have an important role to play as part of any information or records related project.  Of course, just getting running a participatory workshop or two or livening up a meeting with some of these exercises alone isn’t going to guarantee a successful RM project, but it might just represent one of the pieces of the records management puzzle that I’m increasingly convinced is missing at the moment.

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.

The making of a maturity model

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

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
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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

Measuring records management in the 'post-compliance era'

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.

Is it worth investing in records management?

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.

Budget cuts and back office functions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Measure for measure

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.

JISC infoNet Innovation in Records Management Award

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!!