tfpl blog

Records management in SharePoint - the debate continues

Author: John Davies
TFPL, Senior Records and Information Management Consultant

Have just read a stimulating post by James Lappin on his blog examining the possibilities of SharePoint for records management.  Now, this is the current hot topic (in RM circles at least) and revolves around the question of whether SharePoint 2010 can provide the functionality (or some of the functionality) of a conventional EDRMS.  Microsoft claims it can but do not, as James points out, intend to seek certification against DoD 5015.2 or MoReq 2 and while SharePoint 2010 can do a form of records management, it is records management as defined by Microsoft, not as defined by the international records management community. 

So exactly what is this Microsoft version of records management?  Well, the Records Centre familiar to users of SharePoint 2007 is still there in 2010 and has some additional features.  Putting aside the question of how or how well it works, the Records Centre offers the possibility of doing records management the traditional way; that is, moving a digital object identified as a “record” out of the care of its creator or custodian into a secure place managed on behalf of the organisation.  However, Microsoft then goes on to present an alternative to the Records Centre by allowing users to “declare” records in situ in a team site.  Once declared, the records stay where they are and do not have to be moved to the Records Centre.  So, two models of records management are now on offer:  centralised vs. dispersed control.  How do we make sense of this?  

Our answer is…it depends.  It depends on what sort of organisation you work for and what, if any, records management you need.  If you work for a global energy company and are subject to an immense array of regulations, you will need to pay attention to records management.  You will have to deal with the reality that information is created and managed in many different places using a range of different IT applications including line of business systems and probably more than one EDRMS.  It will not be possible to put all information/records in one “records centre” and at best you will maintain a map of the repositories you know about and try to set some standards for how these are managed. 

If you work for a small public sector agency, a small third sector organisation or a small company or partnership, you could almost certainly get by with using file shares (with some conventions about naming and versioning) and would consider introducing SharePoint as a great leap forward.  You might have some records (very few, perhaps) that need the level of curation made possible by the Records Centre and will certainly have many that can be happily managed in a file share or in situ in a team site.  

It seems to me that Microsoft is offering alternatives which are not exclusive but which the records management community chooses to position as polar opposites.  Irrespective of what it is, there is no sense in arguing for just one model, one system, one corporate approach, today when so many organisations (across every sector) are down sizing, merging, diversifying, splitting, or taking advantage of shared service arrangements.   

Just look at the following list of information domains found in most organisations to see what diversity of approaches exists:

• Formal corporate records e.g. legal instruments, committee minutes and papers, policies, annual reports:  born digital, managed in hard and soft copy, published to the web and/or intranet, preserved long term in an archive or EDRM solution
• Case records:  often managed using a bespoke line of business system where they remain until disposition. 
• Operational support records e.g. finance, HR: often managed using a bespoke line of business system where they remain until disposition. 
• Project records:  complicated assemblies of documents often worked on by multiple members of a project team both inside and outside organisations.  Fertile soil for collaborative software.
• Less well defined (unstructured) working documents:  the documents filling up file shares and team sites that represent the glorious richness and inconsistency of everyday working life.  Often considered a records management nightmare, the majority of these documents do not require long-term preservation and control and might benefit from an in situ records management approach
• Email:  a slough of despond for records managers, if you can’t buy an email archive product, leave email where it is.  It’s better kept in its native application.  Life is too short to drag and drop it somewhere else!

James concludes correctly that “SharePoint is now a mature collaboration system, having gone through several iterations of the product” but I would say that what it offers by way of records management is just that – what it offers.  The debate about what SharePoint does and how it does it will properly continue and we are working with a number of organisations who have embarked on SharePoint implementations for a whole variety of reasons unrelated to records management.  Records managers, meanwhile, must take a metaphorical step back and think hard about the fact that in 21st century organisations records management cannot remain as it used to be.

The past, present and future

Author: Luisa Jefford
TFPL Intelligent Resources, Director - Public Sector Recruitment

I can't believe how quickly the last week has flown by.  It's 7 days since  I delivered a presentation for my colleague Angela Abell . I was asked to  talk about Knowledge Management Competencies "Past, Present and Future" to NetIKX (Network for Information and Knowledge Exchange).

My presentation (which  I'm happy to share if anyone is interested) covered some of the previous outputs of the research which TFPL has undertaken over the past decade.  It highlighted that "Knowledge and Information Professionals" should position themselves as "Knowledge Strategists and Knowledge Specialists" to enable organisations  to become fully engaged and knowledge mobilised. This is a world away from the one of the very first  roles I ever dealt with as a recruiter at TFPL which was the cataloguing of McCarthy cards! How things have evolved in 15 years.

Does the effect of the economy have any bearing on this?  Most certainly, and whilst today I don't think "Knowledge and Information Professionals" should disregard positioning themselves as  "specialists " or indeed "strategists " it is increasingly obvious in my day job that they need some additional skills  to offer as and when required.   

The research outputs showed that as well as KIM and ICT expertise these additional skills include personal attributes and interpersonal, organisational and business  knowledge and having an understanding of what your organisations objectives and core strategies are. A melting pot or perhaps,  to paraphrase more effectively, a  'kit bag'  of tools that will ensure your profile and your value remains aligned to your organisational needs and requirements.

An enjoyable afternoon for me and I will definitely be putting NetIKX on my networking radar . 

UKSG Conference 2010, Edinburgh, 12-14th April – Concerns raised over future of the ‘Big Deal’

Author: David Thew
TFPL Intelligent Resources, Director

The annual conference of the UK Serials Group brings together scholarly publishers of journals and, increasingly, e-book and other digital content providers and their customer base in corporate, public and university libraries and buying consortia, and is seen by many publishers as an essential event. Combining a conference and an exhibition, it provides a valuable forum for discussing a wide range of issues affecting scholarly journal publishing, from impact factors to pricing and the impact of social media.

As a provider of recruitment services to the publishing market, my main focus is the exhibition, a ‘captive audience’ of publishers and information providers which includes many of the top providers of information services to the academic, library and government markets and which is therefore a useful barometer of market sentiment. This year the mood was mixed; some publishers had enjoyed a fairly healthy 2009 and were predicting a similar outlook for 2010, whereas others had been harder hit by downturn in specific geographical markets (e.g. Eastern Europe) and fluctuations in exchange rates which had significantly raised subscription costs for many of their clients (one major publisher who prices in Euros mentioned a client whose annual subscription cost had risen by the equivalent of some £200k purely as a result of currency fluctuation).

One of the main topics of discussion was the future of the ‘Big Deal’, typically a multi-year deal to license a publisher’s entire journal output or a significant part of it. Here the uncertainty was about academic budgets post-Election; with public sector spending facing drastic reductions whatever the flavour of the next UK government, the scholarly market will have to make cuts somewhere and two likely areas are staffing and collections, the latter with obvious implications for subscription revenues even where institutions are technically tied into multi-year deals. Clearly this could be a serious issue for small and large publishers alike and publishers may need to be creative even with deals which are technically already in place.

From a recruitment perspective, the conference suggested clear signs of green shoots, albeit with a lot of caution and some organisations not predicting any new hiring before the second half of the year at the earliest. There is also (again, cautious) growing interest from candidates; there is a still a lot of risk aversion, but also signs of people beginning to consider their next career move, an indication of growing confidence in the market.

David Thew is Director, Publisher and Content Provider Recruitment at TFPL Intelligent Resources (david.thew@tfpl.com; tel: +44 (0) 207 332 6076)

Strong demand for training in records management and Web 2.0

Author: Claire Valentine
TFPL, Training and Events

It has been a busy four months since Christmas and we have seen an increasing demand in the need for in house training, as organisations look to gain benefits from the tailoring and customisation that can be achieved by having a trainer come onsite to deliver a course specifically for a team or department.  This can work out very cost effective for organisations too, reducing travel costs and gaining the discounts that can be available through not paying for an external venue.  Key topics have been in records management and web 2.0  in particular how web 2.0 tools can be used effectively within organisations to facilitate communication and collaborative working.

This demand has been reflected on the public access schedule too where we have needed to add new dates on to the programme in these areas.  We also have a number of new courses on the programme that start to go live in May which cover Copyright issues for web 2.0, knowledge transfer between teams and an overview of information security.  Paul Pedley our resident expert trainer in copyright has developed a new course exploring the risks posed by re-using and producing copyright within the web 2.0 world.  Ian Wooler and Sandra Ward senior associates and trainers at TFPL have developed a new course looking at sharing of knowledge between teams and how to encourage this transfer.  We also have the pleasure to welcome new trainer Vic Parry to the team to run an Introduction to Information Security looking at the ISO 27001 2005 standard and what it means for your business.  Full details on these courses can be found in the training pages of our website.

We are looking forward to a busy summer and to meeting some of you on the courses and events we have coming up.

The Library of Congress to archive all "Tweets"

Author: Shooresh Golzari
TFPL, Consultant

According to this BBC article, The Library of Congress is set to archive every Tweet that has ever been and every Tweet there ever will be. In effect, this is an attempt to preserve the [social] historical context around world events (i.e.) what people were saying, for example:

• before and after Barrack Obama was elected as US president in 2008;
• the drama around the Iranian elections of 2009 as it was unfolding;
• or in reaction to the earthquake disaster of 2010 in Haiti. 

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging service, which allows users to post their thoughts on anything in no more than 140 characters; the number of users is well in excess of 60 million and ever growing and there are reportedly up to 55 million "Tweets" per day.  My first reaction to this news, given that number, was to wish any future historian luck in finding any gems amongst all the drivel. But... I then remembered the clever search mechanism built into Twitter ("hashtags") and Google's hand in enhancing search in Twitter is apparently also being utilised by The Library of Congress.

Rhetoric, Fashion or Fact: 2010's first Connect Conference

Author: Lucy Frost
TFPL, Head of Training and Events

Last week we held our first TFPL Connect event of 2010.  It was great to see a combination of new members along with some familiar faces. Speakers Michele Fordyce from EEF, Hank Malik from Carbon Trust and Caron Cant from Birmingham City Council introduced their ideas about future challenges for KIM specialists, which sparked some interesting questions and thoughts from the audience.

The evening was chaired by Martin Sanderson, TFPL and began with Michele Fordyce sharing with us her experiences at EEF, looking at how they engage with their customers through the new Information and Research function. Michele explained this turn around had been made possible by focusing on the key business needs, building relationship with the service lines and senior management and talking the language.  Engaging with internal customers was vital to demonstrating how KIM could contribute to the business goals, help functions meet their targets and increase value to members.

Hank Malik, then gave some interesting insights in to knowledge and innovation, discussing how we have moved from collecting content, through communities and connecting people, to ‘the wisdom of crowds’ enabled by ‘open’ connectivity in public spaces. Open innovation, the public exchange of ideas is, he argued is the next phase of KIM but with this brings issues around governance and control of information.

Caron Cant, went on to talk about her experiences at Birmingham City Council , where she highlighted that with over 56,000 employees, recognition and reward of information management skills and behaviour was key to developing an effective information driven organisation.

Interestingly in a KIM world of W2.0 technologies, blogs, jams, podcasts, it was communication and people skills that topped the speaker’s agenda. However, during the evening it became clear that there are three central issues that are likely to be with us for sometime:  the tension between structure and freedom; aligning with business drivers and customer focus; and the recognition and reward of KIM skills and behaviours.

Rhetoric, Fashion or Fact was one of TFPL Connect's regular events.  All our Connect members will receive a summary of the evening and we will be running three further evening events during the year.

SharePoint 2010: what it means for information professionals and their organisations

I recently made a trip to Microsoft for a workshop on SharePoint 2010 at their campus in Reading.  The picture I took away is of a shift in focus away from development to configuration (and there's a hell of a lot more to configure), illustrated by the following:   

• Complex (or simple) records and document management policies (compliant with DoD 5015.02, amongst other things) can now be configured into the system at and across every level and site location, or simply determined ad hoc.  It looks like a complete EDRMS is on the cards with hierarchical (file-plan like) structuring, automatic document ID numbers and-all with a highly intuitive and attractive browser (any browser) based user interface. 
• Developers will no longer be needed to come in and hack into your SharePoint in order for it to communicate with other databases and systems.  All of this can be configured out of the box without any knowledge of or ostensible use of code.
• As a result of the above and because the development engine, Visual Studio 2010 (sold separately of course), is integrated into the Central Admin area I think that significant investment on bespoke coding is a thing of the past. For example, .NET coding can as easily be published to SharePoint 2010 as a document might be through a standard CMS. In addition to this, the .NET coding language is relatively easy to pick up for quick learners, which systems admins usually are.
• My opinion is that outlay in development will revolve around (app by app) bespoke applications development which has been readily facilitated through the provision of APIs meaning that apps can be built and rolled out through the Central Admin (or the ‘back office’) development tool-kit.

On cost, for organisations that have made a sizable resource commitment to MOSS 2007 already, the prospect of further investment in SharePoint 2010 might initially be a turn off[*].  If however they are persuaded by the additional functionality (particularly in what was formerly business intelligence, the records centre and mySite) then they still face the requirement to upgrade their hardware to x64 (currently it is x32). This x64 backroom hardware is needed to effectively accommodate technologies such as ajax which make for seamless and smooth user operability on the client side but demand significant resources from the servers to that end. This demand scales up with increases in user numbers and user activity, which will be a significant consideration if organisations start adopting SharePoint as a “full featured business platform”, as Microsoft is touting it.

Additionally, upgrade/migration from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint was not something that was readily covered and I suspect 2007 users may be in for a rougher ride, price-wise and technically, than they might otherwise have expected.  This may be a particular issue to those organisations that invested heavily in 3rd party bespoke development of the product.

So, how significant is the advent of SharePoint 2010 to the information professional? Well, we have always known that information architecture, information governance (inclusive of its pillars such as policies, rules etc) and sound information management in general are critical to the success of any electronic information system deployment.  And, with the removal of significant functionality barriers in SharePoint 2010, the continued importance of this cannot be stressed enough in giving systems administrators something to consider before bending to every whim of their users. 

It is therefore critical that the advice of the information professional is heeded at the highest levels of management and engendered into the IT psyche.  The blueprints of a successful implementation should be drawn up, highlighted, championed and followed from the very beginning, lest the onset of “SharePoint Sprawl”, a symptom of poor information architecture and a lack of information management forethought, generally; and one with which many, if not most, MOSS 2007 implementations contend.

If you have information management concerns around your deployment of SharePoint, or any other system, contact us for expert advice and solutions.

Authored by Shooresh Golzari, tfpl consultant.

[*] Recent conversations with clients and SharePoint integrators indicate that this is true.

Twitter: your mouth on the internet

You heard it here first: Twitter is your mouth on the internet. 

Just like your mouth, you can watch what you say with Twitter, you can use Twitter only when you need to and, you can speak babble and trivially converse with others as often and carefree as you please... whether they pay any attention or not is another story!

Now, I suspect that if researchers felt the need to fill their time with a study of exactly what kind of speech we use our mouths for every day, the results would be a little something like this:

• Pointless babble: 40.6%
• Conversational: 37.6%
• Pass-along value: 8.7%
• Self promotion: 5.85%
• Spam: 3.75%
• News: 3.6%

Today, I was pointed towards an article in Library and Information Update, entitled Twitter 'babble' drowns out 'news'.  The above are statistics on the nature of tweets from a study into the social media tool from America, which this article gave its take on.  For any regular user of Twitter they are not surprising, I somewhat suspect.

The research report seemingly made much of the disparity between the percentage of babble vs news, using it as a basis to challenge Twitter's claim to being the 'premier source for news and events'. 

A hollow challenge if my analogy has any substance.

It seems to me that there is an obsession with trying to frame Twitter into a particular category.  What is Twitter?

• Is it a professional development tool?
• Is it a social development tool?
• Is it another form of procrastination?
• Is it a tool for self expression?
• Is it s a tool for exhibitionism?
• Is it a prime news source?

Twitter defies this approach because of its informal and conversational nature, the essence of its versatility as a tool.  Twitter is all of the above and more.

Shooresh Golzari

Consultant

(Now, excuse me while I go on Twitter to embark on some shameless exhibitionism, self expression and professional network development by way of broadcasting this prime piece of news.)

Local government: how to get it right with social media

Computing posted an article highlighting interesting statistics from the Local Government Engagement Online Research Blog such as:

• over 50% of councils do not engage with their stakeholders with online social media (aka Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, YouTube etc.)
• 20% are using RSS or Twitter
• 15% use YouTube
• and 11% have a presence on Facebook

Considering that councils across England and Wales - and the UK as a whole for that matter - more or less operate using the same organisational structure and exist for the same purpose within their local context, it is surprising that there is no centralised and cohesive strategy to guide them all in exploiting the potential of social media.

Naturally, I imagine that there will be a lot of apprehension over this new territory with uncertainty on the potential risks vs. the benefits, uncertainty which is reflected in the figures above.  Doubtless, the more adventurous councils (the minority) have some valuable lessons learned.

UK councils should use the resources at their disposal and mandate a body, perhaps the IDeA* to develop a strategy for, promote, and help them implement an effective, cohesive social media strategy to engage with their stakeholders. Such an approach should not overlook the good work that has already been done and should take note of any mistakes made. 

*The IDeA is already commissioned to promote social media and collaboration among local government employees and their partners across the country.

Shooresh Golzari

Consultant

Ban Facebook from the workplace? No... employ someone to use it, silly!

Why all bosses should copy me and ban Facebook from the workplace (by Theo Paphitis) and Whitehall looks for a £120,000 'Twittercrat'; these are two stories from the Daily Mail which were brought to my attention this morning.

In the first article, Theo describes how witnessing his employees wasting time on the social networking site, Facebook, has led him to ban it completely from his business.  He goes on to highlight a few statistics and uses these as the basis for his overarching opinion that all bosses should be like him.

Is this really the answer?  Theo supposes that by banning Facebook, public sector and corporate employees would spend that time productively instead - for those of us who have been around long enough to know what office life was like before Facebook, it is obvious that some people will waste time regardless of the media at their disposal.  Aside from that, in some instances, social media like Twitter are actually complementary to an individual's professional pursuits and development.  For example, I have successfully used Twitter to find answers to technical SharePoint administration problems which I have encountered.

The opinion often conveyed in management and human resource science, which is informed by more than sensationalist tabloid headlines, recommends that the issue of time wasting by employees be addressed by performance measures, benchmarks and suitable coporate guidelines on the use of corporate resources.  An employee should then be reviewed against these cirteria. 

The second story (Whitehall looks for a £120,000 'Twittercrat'), gives a starkly contrasting image, to that of Theo's ideal, of the government actually paying someone to use social media at work!  Of course, this headline is typically sensationalist and if one cares to read a little further, the role is actually a little less shallow than that.  It is for a "deputy director of digital engagement" - which can be dubbed as the public sector's equivalent of digital marketing.  The validity of this role for me personally lies in whether it is used as another mouthpiece for government propaganda, as the Conservatives claim, or whether it is used to engage with the public at large in a way conducive to the betterment of our society.

Shooresh Golzari

Consultant, TFPL