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.

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.

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.

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!

Our first Codice Key, “Shortcut Keys in HP TRIM” shows you how to use your keyboard to perform HP TRIM related tasks without using your mouse.  Have you ever wanted to quickly switch between open search windows in TRIM? Or maybe quickly add documents to your favourites with out wading through menus? Our quick, two page guide will have you navigating and working with TRIM faster than ever!

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??

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.

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