tfpl blog

Brave New World Re-visited

Just received the October 2009 issue of the Journal of the Society of Archivists (Vol 30, number 2) which is a themed issue devoted to Freedom of Information.  Guest edited by Margaret Crockett, the issue contains a range of articles on the Act itself and its application, the Code of Practice on Records Management, a useful literature review of the impact of the Act on Local Government, and an interesting reflection on governance and record keeping in Sierra Leone.

It's five years since the legislation came into force so there is now a considerable body of expertise and experience amongst the archives and records community.  New entrants to the field could do no better than to read this issue as a way of understanding the legislation, the key guidance provided for it in government, and accessing the rich literature that has built up around it.Well done, archivists!

From tapes to MP3s and beyond....

TFPL associate and trainer David Bowen comments on the topical issue of digital preservation:

Is inertia good for information?  No.  Resistance to change, the tendency of organisations or individuals to keep dong the same things in the same ways, is fatal to your information management and to your information assets.  Change is going to happen whether we like it or not, and whether we plan for it or not:  people will retire or move on;  computers will be upgraded or replaced;  software will be upgraded, replaced, or just disappear;  and new technologies (like Flickr, Twitter, Blackberries, Google Wave) will appear and be used in your organisation or industry. 
 
Digital Preservation, asking the question "Will we still be able to read (use, repurpose) this digital asset in 5 years, or 50 years?", is part of the solution.  So avoid inertia and the rapid, invisible loss of your digital assets.  Embark on the digital preservation roller-coaster:  it is easy to get started;  the ride will be exhilarating;  and you'll have all your assets at the end of it!

David Bowen, who specialises in this area has worked with computers since 1968, and has been concerned with preserving, sharing and using computerized data since 1972. He was the Architect on the Digital Preservation Testbed (a seminal digital preservation initiative of the government of the Netherlands) and has been working in Information Management and Digital Preservation with clients in industry and government since 1994.  He has recently developed a training course in the practical aspects of Digital Preservation for us.

Claire Valentine

Training and Events Officer

Records Management: the big re-think must come soon

Originating in the economic and demographic boom years after the Second World War, Records Management was, and remains, a set of control functions designed to deal with large and steadily growing quantities of organisational paperwork.   The prevailing management ethos at that time was top down, hierarchical, command and control management built on the perceived values of measurement, predictability and centralised long-range planning. 

For me, the concept of Management by Objectives (MBO), first outlined by Peter Drucker in 1954, captures perfectly the control environment in which records management grew up.  Aligned objectives, flowing down from the centrally generated strategic plan, ran through organisations, stifling collective innovation and individual creativity alike in the interests of mechanistic control.

Against this backdrop, Records Managers built large and highly engineered systems that set out to control documentation from “cradle to grave”.  You could see these systems working until the early 1990s in many large companies in the USA and, to some extent, in the UK but most were left abandoned as their parent organisations adapted to new global trading conditions or simply dissolved around them through acquisitions and mergers.

The widespread adoption of the PC, email systems and, finally, laptops throughout the 1990s increased the pace and volume of daily work – established clerical support and filing staff melted away in this period -   leaving Records Managers bewildered and in search of the records they once so successfully managed. 

The backdrop changed too, despite the efforts of many organisations to uphold the principles of scientific management.  Different ways of understanding organisations began to infiltrate management writing and thinking and, for many practicing managers, the old notions of predictability and certainty were consigned to the waste bin.  These ideas have yet to impact on records management which has, for two decades now, stood still while its professionals sought a way to re-establish the control over a world they have lost.

The principles for the re-frame are:

•    Sort work into formal and formless – structured stuff as opposed to messy stuff (rhythm)
•    Look for records that are obviously owned and used by people (proximity)
•    Note when records are not owned or used very much (distance)
•    Let people create the records they believe they need to create (trust)
•    Work with whoever you need to work with to identify and understand the rules you have to follow (compliance)
•    Be a helping hand not a scolding finger.

John D. Davies
Senior Consultant (TFPL Ltd)

Records Management Society Conference, April 2009: ‘Back to the Future’

The RMS has to be congratulated on another successful Annual Conference and especially for attracting such a large number of exhibitors and delegates.

It seemed more like “back to the past” than the future at times with most sessions following the well established RMS format of presentations followed by questions.  However, while I spotted nothing new to set the world of records management alight, it was an excellent practitioner and networking event, peppered with some useful and interesting sessions.

A little controversy always helps a conference and this came straight from the opening session by Heather Brooke, journalist and author of Your Right to Know.  Heather has campaigned to make government more open and accountable using FOI legislation. To me, her talk served as a sharp reminder of why records are so important. As a profession we should not forget that the content of records (and the associated need for structure, findability and connectivity) should not be overlooked as we focus on managing the container and business end of our work.

The sessions from the academic sector were also a highlight for me with Tom Jackson, Loughborough University, and Rachel Hardman and Elizabeth Lomax from Northumbria University leading the way. Tom’s ‘Death by Email’ like ‘Death by Chocolate’ is always guaranteed to be popular. Death by research methodology came to my mind a little during their presentations and I think a little less method and more time on findings and impact would have been welcomed by RM practitioners.

Having said that the new and innovative action/participative research led by Northumbria University is very exciting to hear and participate in. Some of the outcomes from the Continued Communication and  Accelerating Positive Change in ERM research projects are useful and thought provoking.  For more comments on the conference you could listen into the Northumbria podcast hosted by Elizabeth.  

Finally, one of the best sessions for me was one I had the honour of chairing (no bias), from Dr David Reeve, Dorset County Council, who gave a very succinct overview of how they had gone about applying retention and disposal schedules in an EDRM system. The presentation was full of good tips and practices but most important for me was the example David set of how a professional RM can use the theory and their intelligence to take a pragmatic approach to applying solutions taking into account the restrictions of the technology and the business and the realms of possibility. What was also refreshing was to hear that David was not afraid to innovate and take risks in offering new solutions, knowing that one may fail and need mending.  He who dares…

Martin Sanderson
Senior Consultant (TFPL Ltd)

The Ministry of Justice overwhelmed by information requests

On Monday, The Times* reported that the Ministry of Justice has been unable to satisfactorily process a third of the enquiries it is obliged to answer under the Freedom of Information Act.  The irony was highlighted by the Shadow Justice Secretary, Nick Herbert. He pointed out that it was the MoJ which introduced the legislation and blamed his government counterpart, questioning the commitment of the present establishment to open government as a result. In its defence, the Ministry has recognised the extent and seriousness of the problem and stated that it is working with the Information Commissioner's Office in taking steps to improve compliance to its FoI obligations. 

Political sentiments aside, this demonstrates the continued information and records management difficulty that government institutions still face in fulfilling their statutory FoI obligation of transparency and accountability, a full four years after the legislation took effect and nine years after its introduction. 

*Backlog in Freedom of Information requests grows. (2009, January 12). The Times, p. 18.

Tensions and contradictions of records management inside the organisation

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

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!!

The Cabinet Office has a new Head of Knowledge and Information Management: but what does it mean for EDRM?

The UK National Archives (TNA) used to be the main champion and driving force behind EDRM (Electronic Document and Records Management). In 1999 they issued a specification that defined the key features of EDRM systems as we know them, systems that:

• hold a corporate fileplan

• hold retention rules and access rules

• allow record folders and the documents inside them to inherit retention and access permissions from their place in the fileplan

TNA instituted a testing regime and approved those EDRM systems that met their standard. In the years after 1999 whenever a UK Government Department needed a corporate document management system they routinely specified that it must be TNA approved.

In 2005 the National Archives ceased testing new systems against theirtandard. One of the reasons for that they ceased testing was their preception that it led to an over focus on the technology. Just because an organisation implemented software that complied with TNA standards did not automatically mean that a couple of years later it would be churning out robust and reliable electronic records. So much depended on the configuration of the system, how it interacted with other systems on their IT estate, the quality of the fileplan and how (or whether!) users adopted it.

Not only have the National Archives now eased testing EDRM systems, they have also started adopting a distinctly neutral tone when talking about EDRM. Although they succesfully use an EDRM system (Objective) themselves in their own office, their official stance is that EDRM is one possible solution, that works for some organisations in some circumstances.

In 2007 Roger Smethurst, then Head of Information and Records Management at DEFRA, decided to pull the plug on DEFRA's implementation of a TNA approved EDRM system. Instead he implemented SharePoint, a system not built on the EDRM model (out of the box it has no place to store a fileplan). DEFRA chose not to plug in an EDRM system behind SharePoint, instead they made customisations to SharePoint to put in as much records management functionality as they felt they needed. DEFRA's implementation is seen by some as a model of how to implement SharePoint as your main document and records repository.

Roger is a refreshingly straight talking person. His has made his views on EDRM clear in many presentations over the past couple of years: he thinks the problem with it is that it requires ordinary staff to think and act like records managers.

Roger Smethurst has just been appointed Head of Knowledge and Information Management for the Cabinet Office. The appointment brings Roger back in contact with EDRM, after ditching it at DEFRA. The Cabinet Office have recently finished rolling out an EDRM system to all of its staff. My mind flashes back to the 2^nd TFPL SharePoint conference - Roger had just finished his presentation about DEFRA's SharePoint implementation. A member of the audience asked him what he missed about the EDRM system after DEFRA ceased using it. 'Nothing' replied Roger.

It is hard not to read into Roger's appointment further evidence of the TNA's cooling towards EDRM: Natalie Ceeney, Chief Executive of the National Archives, was on the interview panel.

James Lappin

A manifesto for records managers in the age of web 2.0

Between 2pm and 3pm this afternoon I participated in a records management webinar hosted by Steve Bailey on his Records Management 2.0 Ning site. Steve set up the Ning site to provide a place for records managers to discuss how to adapt our profession to the web 2.0 world.

The task of the webinar was to see whether we could come up with a manifesto for records management 2.0, drawing inspiration from the Librarian's 2.0 manifesto. The group wanted to retain the positive tone of the Librarian's manifesto, and in particular its positive attitude towards change.

The points flew in thick and fast: here is how the manifesto stood at the end of the webinar:

1. I will recognize that the universe of information culture is changing fast and that records management needs to respond positively to these changes to provide systems, policies, advice and services that are helpful to our organisation, our teams and our colleagues.

2. I will educate myself about the information culture of my users and look for ways to incorporate what I learn into records management services.

3. I will let go of previous practices if there is a better way to do things now, even if these practices once seemed so great.

4. I will take an experimental approach to change and be willing to make mistakes.

5. Whilst we recognize the need for final assured quality in record-keeping systems this should not inhibit experimentation, innovation and development.

6. I will not fear Web2.0 services, but rather will take advantage of services users need to deliver agreed benefits to their business/organization.

7. I will avoid requiring users to see things in records management terms but rather will shape services to reflect users' preferences and expectations.

8. I will be willing to go where users are, both online and in physical spaces, to practice my profession.

9. We recognise that it is not easy for our colleagues to keep records: they are overloaded by too many e-mails, and they are faced with a multiplicity of different tools and systems where information can be created and captured

10. We recognise that we will never have a perfect records system, and can never guarantee that our organisation will have full records of everything it does, but we will work to improve the organisation's capability of keeping and understanding ts records

11. We will, at all times, strive to maintain a balance between the needs of our users and the legal, regulatory and operational requirements of our organisations

12. I will recognize that organisations change slowly, and will work with my colleagues to expedite our responsiveness to change

13. We will strive to deliver a service users can trust and that is transparent and open to all stakeholders

James Lappin

The UK's first professor of records management

I went to Northumbria University last week, to see Julie McLeod's inaugural lecture as the UK's first professor of records management.

Julie is project director of a major 3 year research project Accelerating positive change in electronic records management (ERM).  The project is an attempt to find out why progress towards ERM has been so slow, and to develop an architecture for ERM that is based on the ways that people work in organisations.  The project has a very good blog.

A crowd of around 50 people had travelled to Newcastle from all over the UK to hear the lectrue, including records managers, fellow academics, former students and Julie's family. The size of the turn out is testimony to the regard and affection in which the profession holds Julie.

Julie gave an engaging overview of the history of records management and the challenges it faces in today's world.   Shining through the talk was a sense that records management will have to change radically, but will still be very much needed.

Julie talked us through the requirement of the International Records Management Standard that records should be authentic, reliable, usable, complete, and unaltered.  She then contrasted this requirement with three great quotes about the fragile nature of modern digital information:

• 'digital information lasts forever... or five minutes whichever comes first' (title of a 2001 talk on digital preservation by Jeff Rothenberg

• 'The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital' Quote from an article in Wired Magazine by sci-fi novelist William Gibson.  Gibson notes that in literature, film and music nothing is ever started from scatch, and nothing is ever finished, instead things are cut and pasted, sampled, altered, re-combined and re-purposed.  This reminds me of the underuse of the facility in ERM systems to declare a document as a record, thus preventing it from being further edited or altered (though the text can be re-used in a new document).  It is one of the hardest features of ERM to explain to colleagues and is frequently ignored by them: perhaps because it cuts against the spirit of our times.

• 'The liquid version':  this concept comes from a thought provoking article on the future of the book by Kevin Kelly in the New York Times. Kelly thinks that books of the future will no longer stand alone, between two covers, telling a complete story from beginning to end.  Instead they will be drops in the liquid ocean of the world wide web.  Books will be annotated by their readers to link them into the rest of the world's knowledge.  Instead of reading whole books people will pick parts of them, much like i-tunes listeners select from the track-lists of albums.  In records management I often think of a good file as being like a good book: it tells the whole story of a piece of work.  If books were to dissolve would records dissolve too?

James Lappin