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.

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??

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!