The Records and Information Management Professionals of Australasia has issued a statement of support for those currently affected by Floods in Brisbane, and Fires in Western Australia. It contains valuable links to resources for those dealing with records affected by these extremes, and links to other resources that can help.
ASA RIM Professionals Australasia Joint Disaster Statement (PDF)
As a Brisbane based business, we here at Codice have been stunned by the level of damage that the Floods have done to our customers, our friends and colleagues (and in some cases, our own houses!)
The strength of the Queensland Community, and the spirit of Mateship has been overwhelming to see and experience, and we’d like to give a heartfelt thanks to all the volunteers, strangers, and rescue personnel who have worked so hard through such difficult conditions to provide assistance to all those in need.
Part of an effective Records Management Strategy is planning for disaster, and although there is little one can do to mitigate the impact of this existing crisis (paper and water really don’t mix well!) We’d like to extend an offer of help and support to any Queensland Business that has been affected by the deluge.
As a result, Codice would like to provide at no cost, a Records Recovery plan and Disaster Management assessment for businesses affected by the flooding, to aid with their re-building efforts.
If you’d like to take advantage of this offer, contact us at floods@codice.com.au – we’d love to do anything we can to help.
We didn’t get a chance to attend RMAA 2010 on the Gold Coast this year, but I’ve managed to catch up on some of what we’ve missed at the conference, thanks to Twitter.
One of the interesting topics that seems to have arisen is the nature of reconciling all this information that is sprayed into the world through these social media streams. RMAA Professionals love meta data, so the notion of using social media to question the kinds of policy that should be used to determine the way we should approach social media seems to be appropriate. The Library of Congress in the US has recently announced they are archiving every tweet ever.
This question - Is a Tweet A Record? has been discussed a lot among the IM/RM Community, and in an effort to figure out how to connect our ECM Systems with Social Media, I’ve built a prototype tool for Windows that I’m calling “The Social Archivist”.
Effectively, it’s a twitter client exclusively designed for information managers, to allow them to integrate tweets and other social media updates directly into their ECM Systems. The idea goes that information managers can monitor what people say from within and external to their organization, subscribe to particular topics and tags, and either automatically, or manually choose to archive those tweets into their corporate repository.
At the moment, it only works with Twitter and HP TRIM – (but there are some vague hand-wavy plans to include other platforms if there is enough interest.)
If you’d like to get a hold of a pre-release copy of Social Archivist for TRIM, just drop me a line.
Some of the Codice team are escaping the Queensland winter to Port Moresby this week. We’re launching our information management services into Papua New Guinea on Tuesday, with an Information Session being held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.
Codice has a long history with PNG. Our founding director, Chris Scott has lived up here for over 20 years and has a first-hand knowledge of the challenges of managing records and documents in the tropical island environment of PNG. We have had a presence in PNG since 2004, but with the recent growth that’s been happening up here, now seems like a good time to focus on the importance of effectively managing information, and as we all know – it’s always easier to put these policies in place at the start of a project, rather than to attempt to apply them after something goes wrong.
We’re bringing with us some interesting stories, demonstrations of some of the products that we find can help solve pressing IM problems, and would love to catch up with folks to hear their experiences and insights with information governance in PNG – if you’re in town, and you’d like to catch up – we’ll be at the Crowne Plaza on Tuesday (1st June) for a 5 O’clock start – leave us your details, and we’ll be sure to get back to you!
Mobile browsers and smart phones are becoming increasingly popular as platforms for accessing information.
Given that trend, we thought it would be best if we made sure that our information is easily accessible from mobile devices – so today we’re launching our mobile version of Codice, optimized for iPhone, Blackberry and Android phones. You should see the mobile version of our site just by turning up at http://www.codice.com.au/ with a compatible phone.
Now you can read about the information revolution while being part of it!
Special thanks to the folks at WPTouch, who make a remarkable plugin for the WordPress CMS System that we use to power our site, which made building the mobile site amazingly straightforward.
In the wake of the release of HP TRIM 7 last month, a lot of folks are talking. They are talking about its features, discussing integration options, musing over deployment costs… The strange thing is they’re not talking about TRIM. Instead, they’re talking about SharePoint.
A large amount of the launch hype for TRIM 7 ended up directed at something that HP calls “Transparent Records Management“. Sounds catchy right? (To give credit where it’s due, Pie raised this concept long before I heard anyone at HP use it.) And in the case of HP TRIM 7, it is all done through Microsoft SharePoint. Effectively, this is Records Management by stealth. Users keep on using SharePoint and under the covers, everything gets magically sucked into TRIM and nobody ever has to see, learn or care.
The way I see it, what has happened here is inevitable. TRIM was originally built for managing records. As such, it developed a lot of tools that Records Managers needed to meet their compliance requirements. These Records Managers would then have to plead with their Information Technology departments to help install them, and configure them. And it was here, right in the cultural divide between RM and IT that “Transparent Records Management” was born. IT guys are generally hard to impress and TRIM didn’t exactly blow them away. Look at the posts all over the internet of administrators complaining . Additionally, TRIMs “Best Practice” approach to RM – (effectively a whole of life cycle records management approach including users filing their information at the time of creation) came with large training overheads and burdened users to classify the content that they created. From its inception TRIM played to the RM crowd. This move to SharePoint marks their new change in focus – to cozy up to the IT guys.
The RM market is, in the grand scheme of things, reasonably small. It’s conservatively estimated by Gartner at somewhere between 400 and 500 million dollars (USD). The SharePoint market on the other hand is estimated to be over 2.8 billion . Financially, it makes more sense for HP to reduce the functionality of their product in order to address a mass market, than it does to maintain any kind of “Best Practice” approach that only appeals to a small niche market. I’m sure HP didn’t buy TOWER just to make the world’s Records Managers happy.
But it is important to note that if you are using TRIM and SharePoint for “Transparent Records Management”, you are not managing your information as well as you could. A functional Business Classification System designed specifically for your organization is simply not going to mesh very well with the project based structure of a Microsoft SharePoint deployment, no matter how much poking and prodding you do. This transparency comes at a price, and that price is inaccuracy.
Also note that the dumbing down of TRIM isn’t exclusive. TRIM 7 can absolutely be used without SharePoint, and it looks like it may well be the best iteration of the product yet. But the fact that all the talk and marketing noise from Paolo Alto has moved towards SharePoint seems indicative of the new direction that HP are taking the product – one that values part of a large market over all of a small one, profit over best practice, and perhaps for the first time, IT over RM.
Thanks so much for taking the time to be with us this evening.
Now, I know the main reason we’re here is to have a drink and catch up with each other and gossip, and I’ll let you get back to that soon. But I just wanted to steal a little of your time to talk about three things that have been bugging me about information management in the 21st century.
When I was a boy, I wanted to be a teacher… or a fireman… and sometimes an astronaut… and a cowboy. Oh, and the guy who reads the news…
Nowadays, I have trouble explaining what it is I do to my kids.
In fact, I overheard my son talking to one of his friends about me the other day:
“My Dad is over there” he pointed. “He’s a computer nerd.”
And I guess that’s true, in some sense — I am. So, he’s right. But let’s face it, job titles aren’t what they used to be. (Nobody ever handed me a business card with “Cowboy” written on it.) And it’s getting harder to explain what we do to our kids.
As people who care about information management this curious fact should be very important to us:
The way people work is changing.
There are less and less menial jobs as a percentage of the global economy. More and more people are creating information for a living. They’re getting paid to think stuff. And enter it into some computer. And then to do stuff with the stuff they’ve thought up and stored. As a result, the amount of information is increasing.
Okay, so this is something that, in our field, we hear all the time — oh help, we’re sucking on the end of a fire hose, information overload! Sales guys love to tell that story. So I’m not going to bore you with it again. But we should all be aware that this trend is occurring — if nothing else, it means a lot more work for us all to do.
The second thing is this:
The mediums that people are using have changed.
The young people who are joining the workforce today are steeped in information.
But the way they see and interact with that information is different — they’ve grown up with Facebook and Twitter and SMS. They think that email is lame. They think that paper is old-fashioned, and harmful to the environment. They are used to being able to reply to any piece of information they see. They share things much more freely, and thrive when given autonomy and freedom — two things that often aren’t exactly the hallmarks of many workplaces.
As Information Managers, we need to understand these mediums and these ways of thinking. We have to be able to manage, preserve, track and harness the content in these systems. They’re not going away.
This brings me to my other third thing:
What people expect from their systems has changed.
When I was at Elementary School, my school librarian was a lady called Mrs Gamble. She must have been about 85, and she was the sweetest thing. (As a fledgling nerd, she and I spent quite a bit of time together.) But there was one way to make her turn absolutely purple — put a book back on the wrong shelf. This heinous crime was punishable by a 10-minute lecture on the Dewey Decimal System, and the importance of proper filing of books so they could be accurately recalled by others.
“Do NOT!” She would shriek, “Ever put a book on the wrong SHELF!”
Thirty years later, Google came along and completely wrecked the world of information management. All of a sudden, in a wholly electronic world, the problem wasn’t that the book was on the wrong shelf. The problem was shelves. (Mrs Gamble would turn in her grave.) Google took a completely different approach to our established concepts of taxonomy, ontology, and organisation. Managing electronic information means that our old physical approaches could be re-thought. People have preconceived notions of how information systems ought to behave, because they use them daily in their lives.
So:
The way people work is changing
The mediums that people are using have changed
What people expect from information systems has changed
Delivering Information Management solutions into this landscape is challenging. But the potential rewards and motivation are greater than ever.
And we would love to be able to help you, if we can.
Thanks
Welcome to the Codice Blog – With information swirling around us in all kinds of new and interesting formats, We’ve decided to start a regularly updated section of the site, dedicated to information management, records management and emerging ways that allow us to improve the way we contain the river of information that we manage in our daily lives.
We hope you’ll stick around – add us to your RSS feeds, follow us on Twitter – hopefully we will have some interesting insights to share, and we would love to have you share your thoughts with us!