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…
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
Blogging - whats it all about??
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…
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…
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
An interesting debate on RM in the Web2.0 world...
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 shaphng 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
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 shaphng 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
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