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.

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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.

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

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

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

Beyond compliance - the future of records managment

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

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

As ever all thoughts and comments are welcome...

JISC infoNet Innovation in Records Management Award

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

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

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

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

Records Management Witness Seminar

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


2nd Northumbria University Witness Seminar Conference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining 'Records Management 2.0'

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

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

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