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.

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!

More than just the latest technology buzzword, Web 2.0 is a ‘transformative force that’s propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business’. Because good recordkeeping is an essential enabler of efficient and accountable democratic governance, like every other sphere, records managers must also evolve if they are to have a role to play in this new world.

Records Managers have eagerly adopted Web 2.0  in order to share information. After searching high and low I have discovered many blogs,tweets, RSS Feeds, Facebook Pages and Ning Networks used by information professionals. Here is a list of a few of my favourites:

But, as any good Records Manager knows, information comes in many forms, not just text. The Public Records Office of Victoria have a variety of podcasts which are informative but my favourites are those produced by Digital Preservation Europe with their comical take on preservation and digitisation! So I think it is safe to say that records managers and information professionals are jumping onboard the Web 2.0 force.

The challenge however, lies in managing the information for their organisations – who are also on board.

As a result of Web 2.0 applications, what constitutes a record has become confusing. Records developed from Web 2.0 applications which contribute to transactions of business or evidence, are essential to building an organisation’s memory. And as Musser and O’Reilly (2006) have declared – this is the new way of doing business! Therefore these ‘records’ generated in Web 2.0 applications must be tracked, captured and maintained like any other record. The challenge for records managers is to collaborate with members of the organisation to determine whether the uses of Web 2.0 applications are linked to a business purpose, and to develop and implement policies that cater for the fast and effortless creation of records. All the while, ensuring that they fulfil the international standard of being authentic, inviolate, complete and accessible (ISO 15489, 2001).

I am yet to see an information management policy on the use of Web 2.0 applications. Anyone out there able to show me otherwise??

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.

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!