The National Archives position on EDRM

In my last blogpost I wrote about the way that the UK National Archives has modified its stance on EDRM over time.  

Natalie Ceeney, Chief Executive of the National Archives, has left a detailed comment to the post, in which she explains the current position of the National Archives on EDRM.

The clarification is very useful indeed,  here is a full copy of Natalie's comment:

Given this post, it might be helpful if I explained The National Archives' position on EDRM?

It seems clear to me that, despite massive spend and huge energy on EDRM solutions, we haven't solved the issue of making sure we keep electronic records effectively. Why? Because I don't think we've been asking the right questions or have approached the challenges of e-records in the right way.

We believe that the first question to ask needs to be 'what do we need to keep?' and then, and only then 'so how do we keep it?'. If organisations did this systematically, most would probably find that some bits of their organisation create far more critical records (e.g. Procurement: legal contracts, CEO's Office: board minutes, HR: personnel records) than others. And they'd also identify a number of important records needing to be kept which were not on people's personal systems - e.g. discussions happening on intranets or wikis, or blog sites, or web announcements. And they'd probably also find huge swathes of their organisation which never create or use any of these records beyond their initial reading. We have to start here if we know what problem we're trying to solve.

Only when we've done this should we consider 'capture'. The problem with EDRM implementations is we've seen them as 'the solution' whereas, in reality, they are part of a jigsaw of solutions depending on what you're trying to keep. The solution to capturing the wikis and blogs might be web harvesting, allowing the discussion to continue freely. The solution to keeping records of contracts and associated negotiations might be to set up an automatic feed from the contracts team's shared drive into a secure repository. And for only some of the key records, and for some of the organisation, the answer might be an EDRM system. And even there, the 'answer' might be to use EDRM as a back office infrastructure component and not a front end interface, harvesting clearly identified information from email boxes or shared drives. And we may not need to pay for licenses for everyone if not everyone needs to use it.

And there is another key component here - our users. Records are rarely created by anyone other than as a by-product of their job. And the main beneficiary of records is usually the organisation, or others in the organisation, and not the creator. The problem with many EDRM implementations is that we've made the user do more work. And so that user has a choice - work more hours, or skip the filing. Unfortunately, most of us know that the latter tendency predominates. And this is a potential disaster for organisations whose reputation and financial stability depend upon good record keeping. We need to make record capture easy, and ideally invisible to the creator, whilst focusing the creator of records on the need to do their job, and record decisions, well. This will make their lives easier, and really help organisations in terms of risk and governance.

So, in summary, The National Archives does support 'EDRM'. But only as a tool for capture, not as 'the solution to e-records'. The priority for our community is to make sure that the key information created is kept for appropriate periods - for the sake of the long term of the organisations we support. Starting by asking about 'what needs to be kept' rather than about EDRM might take us far further forward to achieving this goal.

And finally, in response to comments above [I had mentioned that Natalie was on the interview panel that appointed Roger Smethurst, who has expressed scepticism about EDRM, as Head of Knowledge and Information Management of the Cabinet Officer], I can assure anyone reading this that when interviewing people for senior roles, I am looking for a broad range of information management as well as influencing and wider engagement skills, and do not base my assessment on their position on EDRM technology!!

Comments

[Tim]

This is very refreshing to hear.

I am a new graduate in the RM field and am working in an organisation which employs the mantra - to paraphrase - "if it's part of your work, it belongs in the EDMS".

Very frustrating.