Steve Bailey's new book landed on my desk with an agreeable thud this week. It is a compelling read (I missed most of Spain v Russia to finish it!).
Here is my summary of the key points:
WHY SHOULD RECORDS MANAGERS TAKE NOTICE OF WEB 2.0?
Web 2.0 will have bigger implications for records management than any previous IT revolution
- when the PC and the office network came upon us in the mid 1990's records management simply transferred its paper practices over into the electronic world: building classification structures and folders into network drives or EDRM systems
- when Web 1.0 came along in the late 1990s records managers could ignore it. Colleagues passively consumed web sites, but they were still dependent for their own work on systems provided, policed and controlled by their organisations
- Now web 2.0 is here: colleagues can create, share and store information in any number of web-hosted packages: Google docs, blogs, wikis, , Slideshare, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook etc. The information is not held on the organisations' servers. Web 2.0 tilts the balance of power in relation to information away from the organisation towards the individual.
Organisations will not be able to bring web 2.0 entirely in-house.
- Organisations could choose to deploy internally hosted social networking sites, wikis, bloggs, social bookmarking services. But why would colleagues make use of them in preference to the bigger and more exiting originals that exist on the web? Why use your firm's social networking site when half of your colleagues are on Facebook anyway, together with your freinds and family? Why use your firms document management system when you have an individual Google docs account?
Organisations will not be able to ignore web 2.0
- There will be pressure for the organisation to use the same web 2.0 sites as its stakeholders use. A University that posted a video onto its external website were told by their audience that it would have been more useful to them on You Tube, where they could have commented on it and embedded it in their own blogs and sites.
Organisations will increasingly choose to store information in the web cloud rather than on their servers.
- The cost savings to the organisation of not having to purchase, back up and maintain servers, plus the benefit to the users of being able to access information from any machine, will push organisations to use web-hosted provision for their e-mail and general information storage
WHAT WILL THESE TRENDS MEAN FOR RECORDS MANAGEMENT THEORY AND PRACTICE?
Centralised control over records is no longer possible
The idea that an organisation can define a corporate business classification and apply it to all records is no longer tenable for the following reasons:
- It takes too much time and central effort to define and maintain the business classification
- Organisations hold information on a variety of systems and it is impossible to apply the classification across all of them. For example an electronic or hard copy staff file could be covered by a business classification, but what about information held about that individual on the HR database?
- Users resent having to use an alien classification scheme: they would rather have the freedom to describe their own world in their own way
- Records managers can never know enough about each function for the classification to describe all areas of the organisation well. Steve cites the example of the generic business classification for the higher education sector. The compilers were able to do justice to the functions that all organisations do (HR, Finance etc). But it proved difficult to get input from lecturers and researchers, so the 'Teaching and Research' area of the classification was much weaker.
Insisting that records should be managed in the same way regardless of format is wishful thinking.
- Records managers aim to brings together in one place all key documents relating to a particular piece of work regardless of the format those documents were created in.
- This ambition was proving impossible even before the onset web 2.0. RM policies typically state that colleauges should move important e-mails from their in-box and put them on the electronic or hard copy file for that work: but in practice most people don't follow this advice.
- Web 2.0 will make this worse because the key applications are segmented by format (Google docs holds word processed documents Flickr holds photos, Slideshare holds presentations etc.).
WHAT PRINCIPLES SHOULD RM 2.0 BE BASED ON?
- Steve outlines a set of principles for records management 2.0, which he has posted on his blog here.
WHAT COULD RECORDS MANAGEMENT 2.0 LOOK LIKE?
Records management 2.0 must seek to harness the enthusiasm of users
- The enthusiasm with which people voluntarily tag information on Flickr, Del.icio.us and You Tube is in contrasts with the reluctance with which they add compulsory metadata in an EDRM system
- You can't compel people to use EDRM. You could close of all network drives but if you are relying on compulsion colleagues won't give the care needed to select, title and classify their records properly. Steve has a colleague who left a previous employer because he didn't like the EDRM system he was forced to use!
Records management 2.0 will have to give users some choice as to what systems they use
- Organisations could allow their colleagues to use their favourite web 2.0 applications for their work, but put an organisational overlay onto these systems.
Tagging will be as important as metadata in records management 2.0
- Tagging allows a user to describe their own world in their own terms. It is scaleable (the more users that tag a particular document the more accurate the tags are) It also gives colleagues and organisation itself valuable feedback on what records are useful and to whom.
New methods will be needed for retention and appraisal
- Organisations won't be able to keep everything, despite Moore's law and the ever decreasing cost of storage. They will need to dispose of personal information because of the (UK and European) data protection requirement that personal data is not kept longer than necessary. They will need to take account of the sustainability/environmental implications of the power needed to information on banks of servers.
- Manually appraising records to determine whether or not to retain them is no longer possible because of the increased volumes of information in the electronic world
- Macro -appraisal is viable: this is where you look at a whole function or process to determine how long to retain all records arising from it, rather than appraising particular files or file types arising from that function. The weakness for Steve of macro appraisal is that it does not harness the viewpoints of individuals on the retention value of the information they create and use.
- Web 2.0 techniques such as tagging and rating could be used to capture some individual feedback on information to be used as one input into the appraisal process
James Lappin
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