The Life of Information

An interesting article on the proliferation of information.

How will we manage it?

Do we need to?

Answers on a postcard, please...

Social Computing versus Records management : let the debate begin

Social computing is fast becoming the significant cultural experience of the early 21st Century. It consists of Web 2.0 networking tools like bulletin boards, forums, portals, wikis and weblogs. Millions of people use these technologies every day on the internet to keep in touch with friends, interest groups etc all over the world, in the blink of an eye.

These informal on-line networks are gradually (but with increasing pace) being introduced into the working environment to help organisations share knowledge and information. Whisper it softly but these social computing technologies are doing knowledge management far better than we ever could have dreamt possible. (Who said that technology wasn't the answer :-) ???!!)

The challenge for records managers is how we identify and manage the recordness of these new technologies. This is part of the crucial debate about what records management is in the 21st Century. Social computing technologies are challenging our orthodoxies in the work environment and our assumptions about what records are and how we should manage them. In my organisation we are making our first tentative steps towards using social computing technologies. So it's pertinent that we start asking questions about how we should manage the work they create.

First of all, it's probably true to say that we don't know for certain whether staff are ready for it. So we have to create an atmosphere where staff are encouraged to say what they think openly and honestly and where they can find connections and collaborative working spaces with their colleagues. I suppose we have to 'put it out there' and see what happens but we also have to be ready to manage the records that fall out of these new initiatives.

I want to look at these technologies separately and examine what I think are the main issues. Feel free to let me know what you think.

Forums / Bulletin boards / Newsgroups

These are extremely popular and quite simple technologies that give users a place where they can post questions or statements and get responses (and discussions) from anyone else who has access to the system.

There are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of these forums on the internet and they are usually managed by 'moderators' (a.k.a. 'mods') who police the site to make sure there is no offensive content, swearing or abusive behaviours.

In the workplace, I think that there should always be a records manager helping out with the moderating. Then, we can keep an eye on anything that needs to be kept as a record. That's certainly going to be my approach. We will need to write detailed procedures to make sure that any decisions reached, agreements made or significant documents drafted are moved to our ERM systems for storage.

This, of course, raises questions about whether this can be done; whether we have the technology to transfer it seamlessly from the social environment into the records space; or the staff time and energy to do it.

But, of course, this is what might happen in an ideal records management view of the world. The reality is likely to be different. Would we have the staff resources? Do we even want to develop complex infospaces for people to work in, encourage participation and then micro-manage them?

Wikis

A wiki is a website that allows users to easily add, remove and edit content. The ease of interaction and operation make wikis ideal for mass collaboration and authoring. Perhaps the most famous wiki is Wikipedia a massively influential, online, collaborative encyclopaedia. I'm really looking forward to starting one in my organisation. But what do we need to do to make sure we capture the records?

We will have to decide on clear procedures. For example, when does something become a record?Is it X number of days after an amendment? Or every time there's an amendment? On reflection it might be best to treat wikis exactly like you'd treat a website. See the attached link for details of TNA guidance on managing websites.

Blogs

Blogs (or, more accurately, weblogs) are websites where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order.

Blogs can provide commentary or news on a particular subject and some function as more personal online diairies. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

The problem of what to capture (and when) is even more difficult for blogs than it is for wikis. Wikis tend to be collaborative efforts, whereas blogs can be highly personal offerings. So a wiki is, on the whole, more likely to contain records.

We need to establish how much of any blog can be saved as a record. Take this blog, for example, does any of it have the status of a record? Or is just the ramblings of a bonkers mind??? Perhaps it's both, I hear you cry. I've not tried to save this into our ERM system...but I bet I couldn't do it very easily. I could draft out the documents first and upload from the ERM system - but that would take away the immediacy of it.

Let me know if you've been through this already...what did you decide?

I think I need to look again at the National Archives stuff on the management of websites.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/website_toolkit.pdf

Number crunching : is our ERM system being used?

We have approximately 350 staff.

We have been live on our ERM system since November 2004.

There are currently over 1,750,000 objects saved on our ERM system.

Over 830,000 of these objects are documents, spreadsheets and other records
Over 830,000 of these objects are emails

There's only about a difference of 10 between the number of documents and the number of emails.

There are over 110,000 folders and files.

Approximately 6,000 objects are added each month.
Approximately 300 objects are added each working day.

Quite frankly, I'm amazed...and delighted, too.

Let me know how much stuff you have on your ERM system. Are the figures comparable?

Red Kite

The Records Management Society Conference 2007: A Personal View

The 2007 Records Management Society (RMS) Conference was held in sunny Brighton at the beginning of May. The hotel was superb and we only had to walk out of the front door to be on the seafront. I hesitate to use the word 'beach'; this is Brighton after all. Anyway, we couldn't have wished for a better setting - or better weather.

And it was gratifying to see so many delegates there! Long may it continue.

Conference kicked off with an inspirational presentation from Euan Semple on the use of bulletin boards / forums, blogs, wikis, RSS and tagging. Quite simply, this was the most exciting talk I've witnessed at an RMS Conference.

Euan pointed out that the internet enables "globally distributed, near instant, person to person conversations". He noted that using these technologies we can help people find and learn from each other and to use these connections to improve efficiency and increase our ability to innovate. Social tools for networking, for Euan, transform our ability to get things done in the 21st Century.

I believe that Euan has shown us the way ahead and I shall return in more depth to the topics he raised in future posts. I am, of course, particularly keen to examine how all of this affects records management, today and in the future. Watch this space.

Next up was Jeremy Stimsonwho gave us a fascinating insight into the Microsoft contribution to records management in Microsoft Office 2007. We looked at why MS is moving into records management and the capabilities of Office 2007.

To my mind, it's great that MS is finally moving into the world of ERM.

The product, unfortunately, isn't up to the mark. MS are about three years behind everyone else and the system they've developed doesn't really do records management. It's clunky and old fashioned. It is, in my humble opinion, a long way off being the finished article. Anyone thinking of adopting it should be aware that there is a lot of configuration that needs to be done beforehand. What's more, there is currently no way of getting emails into the records center!!! This is a serious omission on Microsft's behalf.

Email is the way most business is carried out these days. Any records management system worth its salt has to interact seamlessly with email. This is a bit of a gaffe, to be honest. Shift happens. Why doesn't Microsoft consider emails to be corporate records???

Microsoft ought to get a records manager on the case straightaway!!!

I've asked this question before and I'll probably ask it again,

"How does Microsoft manage its own records?"

The afternoon session on Classification was also superb. Split into four mini-seminar sessions we heard the whole range of opinions on Classification; from classification isn't important if your documents are tagged all the way to the traditional line of classification by function is vital. It was an exciting way to run a seminar session. Hats off to RMS for organising for instigating it (do I also detect Julie McLeod's influence?) and a big thank you to Bob Bater, James Lappin, Clare Cowling and Euan Semple (again).

Richard Blake from The National Archives (TNA) gave, as usual, an intelligent and articulate presentation. He spoke about the achievements made over the last three years in records management in the public sector. Richard noted that records management is a discipline whose time has arrived; it is incresingly recognised as a core component underpinning corporate governance. We all say 'Hallelujah!' to that, Richard.

Many of you will know Richard from his work on developing TNA guidelines for ERM systems. This led us nicely into Mark Fresco's session on the forthcoming requirements in MoReq2. MoReq2 (The Model Requirements for the management of electronic records) is the only international standard for ERM.

It was a thoroughly stimulating and enjoyable conference. And, as usual, the networking was fantastic! Greetings to all of you out there who I was networking with on an epic session on Monday evening / Tuesday morning!!! Hahaha. Red Kite rocks.

Next year I'd like to see...

More interactive sessions, please.

Fewer 'Death-by Powerpoint' presentations and much more use of video presentations.

RMS developing blogs and wikis of our own. And yes, I'd be willing to help! You only have to ask, guys!

Red Kite

My intelligent office : The future direction of Electronic Records Management systems

My intelligent office : The future direction of Electronic Records Management systems.

When they were first developed, Electronic Records Management systems were a bit clunky and very definitely stuck in the 20th Century. Developments are moving on apace and ERM systems are slowly developing into 21st Century technologies. They are still a bit invasive though. They still rely on users consciously and actively participating in the process. I would like to see more emphasis on the intuitive; things happening without direct user intervention. I like to call this my 'intelligent office'. My 'intelligent office' automates processes and makes them more or less invisible to the user. The user still saves work to the ERM system but the interfaces look and feel more intuitive. My intelligent office works on my behalf by learning about my preferences, understanding what I'm working on and pointing me at similar stuff whether it's in my organisation's systems or on the internet.

ERM systems also need to catch up with the developments that are being made in the 'social computing' revolution. Technology is advancing rapidly; more quickly than we, as records managers, can keep up with. So, to give us what we want, new generation EDRM systems have to provide us with the following features:

A single point of access across all systems in an organisation. So that each system is connected to all the others.

Automated classification prompting users to save / name something in a specific way. Helping users to locate the correct file / folder to store their work.

Automatic indexing of all documents based on file-plan or on previous precedent. Intuitive ‘Save As’ features – once the system knows who you are and where you work it can save your documents and name them for you. The system will index everything making it easier to identify which documents are not being used.

Automatic tagging of all documents so their metadata and meaning is preserved and made accessible. This metadata tagging will also help make our work searchable across the organisation and, eventually, across the internet.

All of the above features will lead us to Automatic taxonomy (and metadata) generation

Concept matching dynamically links documents etc with similar content / context allowing automatic hyperlinking between objects

Agent alerting lets you know of all other similar / linked documents ranked by conceptual similarity. Agent alerting can help you find stuff but will eventually help to identify experts; particularly if you are constantly alerted to stuff created by a few different users.

Federated (or Enterprise) searching gives seamless connectivity across all programs / applications / email systems / websites / drives etc. It enables you to search across the whole of the organisation’s systems (whilst maintaining the relevant privileges). Future iterations will also search across the internet. For example, if I searched for widgets I'd find everything my organisation had created on widgets wherever it was stored - not just in the ERM system. This technology will ultimately give you a browser-based search and navigation gateway.

Interest profiling tracks the content with which the user interacts and maintains a profile of the user’s interests. So, if I search for widgets, my system will alert me to any future documents about widgets. Not only that but if, for example, I only ever look at stuff about, say, left handed widgets, my systems will learn from this and present me with stuff about left handed widgets.

Collaboration the end result of matching and profiling is the formation of virtual expert knowledge groups. Finding and sharing information with others is an essential component of my 'intelligent office'

Social computing gives us the ability to link and interact with wikis, blogs, content management systems and to recognise ‘collaborative space’ from ‘records space’. How records managers make use of, and sense of, social computing technologies.

Meaning based computing enables computers to understand the relationships that exist between disparate pieces of information and perform sophisticated analysis operations with real business value, automatically and in real-time.

My intelligent office will also engage with collaborative technologies. I'm looking for

• The ability to integrate with or capture information from new technology direct into EDRM systems (if people want to) e.g. from Blackberrys, PDAs, Instant messaging services and all collaborative tools on the internet.
• The ability to capture new formats (including internet formats), as they are developed, as well as existing formats which are not Microsoft e.g. PDF, JPEG, HTML, mindmap software etc.
• The ability to capture documents from other software systems (HR and finance systems, for example).
• The ability to capture direct from the Internet e.g. portals, wikis, blogs etc
• The ability to replicate the file-plan (the Business Classification Scheme) or parts of it in other systems if required for example Outlook (and other email systems).
• The ability to surmount the problems of software coming from different companies or being hosted by others which do not allow systems to "talk to each other"
• The ability to restrict saving documents to other systems (which becomes even more important if there is no enterprise search engine.

Email management in my intelligent office

Email management is becoming increasingly important in today's corporate environment. It is absolutely vital that my ERM system helps me manage my email account. Likely features of the way my 'intelligent office' interracts with email are

• Full integration with the file-plan (email folders are ERM folders or links to them).
• The ability to transfer email in bulk and rename it
• The ability to capture as records all designated email.

Seamless transfer

My intelligent office will enable me to transfer documents seamlessly from my organisation to others whilst maintaining both their metadata and their integrity.

We need

• Bulk/single transfer between government departments / organisations during the life of a document as well as at the end of it
• Bulk/single transfer between different systems as systems are updated to ensure that documents can still be read, even if they have not been used for several years.
• Import / Export tools are robust
  

Shared services

I'm looking for future systems to help government departments share information more easily. I'd like to see

• One system for all government departments which can be adapted to an individual government departments needs
• A Government departments' thesaurus (not just the IPSV) or at least one that people can customise themselves e.g. shared library catalogues and Dewey classification.
• One centrally hosted ERM/ Information management system for all government departments

Offline working

My intelligent office needs to have the ability to have or to access the file-plan on hard drives, PDAs or laptops and then synchronise and capture updated information from them (and vice versa) when the user synchronises with the corporate system.

Records Management

My intelligent office system will perform many 'normal' RM functions. I'd like to see the following added as standard.

• The ability to change ownership of documents easily en masse
• Spellchecking naming of folders / files / documents, able to restrict words which are not English or are in the dictionary which you can build up.
• Creating folders and files - give suggestions for naming them.
• Creating folders and files - templates for naming styles which records managers can develop
• Global checking of privileges on folders
• Mass updating of privileges
• Automation of audit and appraisal functions

Monitoring

My intelligent office has to

• provide an alert either via email or some other means when a new document on a particular subject or particular keywords in it is added to the system.
• provide an alert when a specific document or folder is updated.

The vast majority of this technology already exists. EDRM software must catch up with it as soon as possible.

RK