ACerm is a records management research project based at Northumbria University.
The project is trying to find out why organisations are no better at managing their electronic records in 2008 than they were when office networks, the internet and e-mail were first introduced.
The research draws inspiration from John McDonald, who in a 1995 article described the unstructured electronic office environment as 'the Wild Frontier'. Ten years later in 2005 he wrote that the electronic office environment was still 'wild' and that organisations were no nearer finding a solution, despite considerable efforts from governments, national archives, professional bodies and vendors.
The ACerm research project has used an academically rigorous methodology whilst engaging with records management practitioners, academics and other stakeholders. One of the aims of the research is to identify the different dimensions of the problem of keeping electronic records, and for each dimension to identify areas for action and improvement.
The project has promised to drip feed their findings back to the records management community, via their project blog.
Last Friday they uploaded onto the ACERM project blog an essay that looks at the question of the marketing of records management, and its perception by the organisation and by individuals.
Here are some of the key insights from the essay:
- RM should be seen as basic organisational infrastructure, like water or computers. But why is it that RM departments are often undervalued, poorly resourced or even non existent, whereas no one would dispute the importance and resourcing of Estates or IT departments?
- ERM needs to be pervasive in the organisation, hidden in the background, by use of systems transparent to the user. But If RM is too much in the background how are staff to be made aware of their recordkeeping role and responsibilities?
- Current RM processes tend to be intrusive, adding work without always obviously adding value. And even where value is added............the extra work is always 'now' while the value may only manifest itself later, or even manifest itself only to some third person
- The challenge is to make RM processes so integral to a person’s normal tasks that they barely register, just as it becomes second nature to put paper in the recycling bin if it is beside the desk, but to ignore that requirement if it demands a trip down the corridor. But it is more complicated than that: the invisibility of the process in this example is backed up by the very high visibility of the principle—the paper is recycled because everyone knows the importance attached to environmental issues. As RM itself is largely invisible, there is little reason to make even the tiny psychological investment of consistently using one process—no matter how unobtrusive or invisible—over another. RM must therefore be made visible, while its processes are rendered invisible—the very opposite, in fact, of the situation that obtains at present.
- RM labours at a disadvantage when compared with other key service departments within an organization: the effects of localized or systemic failure are rarely felt immediately, and rarely incapable of being circumvented in the short term.— Recognition of corporate record management failure may be deferred for months (years?) while knowledge workers refer instead to e-mail dumps accumulated online, ad hoc data dumps in personal external storage devices, or selected print-to-paper reference files. . Loss of power or of business-critical IT systems for even a few hours can lose an organization great sums of money or the confidence / goodwill of its customers and investors; poor recordkeeping, unless allied to business practices that are in themselves questionable or illegal, almost never has such consequences—Enron did not fall because of poor RM, it fell because it engaged in illegal accounting methods
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