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