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.

Organisations face increasing pressure to manage their records according to statutory and business requirements. Hence the adoption of records management programs. However, to be effective a records management program requires ongoing education to make sure the organisation adheres to the recordkeeping policy and understands their effects. A rigorous records management program is only as good as the employees who adhere to it.

The increased generation of records and implementation of systems to manage them has resulted in organisations pushing recordkeeping responsibilities to all employees rather than containing them to specific roles or teams. This means all employees need to be aware of records management and their role in contributing records to an effectively managed organisation. Training should be provided on records management concepts and its importance, and address organisational policies and expectations whilst identifying the responsibilities across the organisation.

E-learning can fulfil this need. According to Wikipedia, E-learning is procedural in character and aims to effect the construction of knowledge. It is learning through electronic resources which empower employees to take charge of their own learning. A replacement to face-to-face training, e-learning enables employees to develop skills with minimal interruption to work processes.

The benefits of e-learning include reduced training costs, flexibility of training delivery, easily updated training content, automated and continuously updated training records and quicker and easier access to training for new users and those needing refresher training. Additionally, e-learning can be customised to reflect the organisation which employs it. Specific business processes can be incorporated into the learning content, not only achieving the development of skills and construction of knowledge, but pursing governance of business processes.

Ensuring your staff understand their recordkeeping responsibilities is key to a successful records management program. Organisations must make ongoing training a priority if they are to meet statutory and business requirements.

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.

This post is from a speech I gave at out our launch function for Codice in January. When I read it over, it seemed like a nice blog post — I decided I like the way I write speeches much better than the way I deliver them!

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!