Mashed Articles

I’ve made the point before that one of the greatest challenges posed by Web 2.0 to records management is the fact that the underpinning focus of control has now shifted significantly from the organisation to the individual (a fact acknowledged by Time magazine two years ago when it made ‘You’ its prestigious ‘Person of the Year’ in recognition of the fact that in the Web 2.0 world ‘You’ control the information age. This trend is, of course, contrary to many of the assumptions on which records management is based which relies upon and extols the virtues of organisation-wide standards, policies and conformity.

In the latest print edition of Information World Review (though curiously not yet on their online version which is still showing last month’s column) David Tebbutt alludes to the same general trend in relation to social networking technologies:

“Forget centralised planning and control. No one can plan these connections, or their value, in advance. Power shifts to the participants who, frankly, deserve it most”.

Though not talking specifically about the RM and governance agenda, its not difficult to see how these same trends apply in this context and point to the need for far more reactive and dynamic approaches to information management which are able to adapt and change ‘on the fly’ .

When I first started hitting the conference circuit and blogsphere last year with my concerns regarding what the rise in Web2.0 and particularly Office2.0 solutions might mean for the future of records management, many I spoke to thought it would never happen to their organisation. So whilst it may have been an interesting theoretical exercise, many dismissed much of what I said as being largely irrelevant to their organisations and their circumstances – particularly if they worked in the public sector. Even at the RMS conference in Edinburgh last month many I spoke to were still clinging to this belief.

But all the while the signs are that this is the direction in which we are heading. Whether this be the use of YouTube to conduct public consultation, as addressed earlier this week, or Paul Dodgson’s post on the RMS Blog discussing how Leicestershire County Council is already ‘dipping its toe’ into Google Apps to explore its potential. Certainly in the Higher Education sector things are moving a pace. Whereas this time last year there were only a couple of examples of institutions wishing to outsource their email to externally hosted services there are now dozens with most IT departments currently at least exploring the pros and cons.

Make no mistake about it: this is something we, as records and information professionals, need to come to terms with and quickly – and not just by paying lip service to it, but by developing new approaches which meet records management objectives in radical new ways.

One of the (very few) advantages of being laid up at home with tonsillitis has been the opportunity to catch up on some reading when energy levels allow.

One thing which caught my eye and which I never expected to see was an advert in the 17th May issue of The Spectator for an advert for a records management system. After all, think about it? When was the last time you picked up a major, national current affairs periodical, with no ties to records or information management and saw such an advert? I thought so.

The full page advert is for Niche Records Management Systems, a specialist system for police forces and is jokingly aimed at the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson (presumably on the assumption that he should buy it for the Met Police). Of course, in reality, it’s designed to appeal to more than just one person but what we can assume from this is that this is an advert for a records management system which is not aimed at the records manager, nor even the IT manager – but the senior executive, policy maker and purse string holder.

The ad then goes on to spell out in clear empirical terms what benefits have been derived from implementing such a system by other police forces (e.g. “Hampshire Constabulary – a sex offender caught in four hours, not two days; North Wales Police – 42% reduction in case file preparation time” etc).

Now these are bold claims and I’m in no position to be able to comment on the true contribution of records management or this particular system to achieving them (so please don’t see this as any endorsement of this particular product which I know nothing about). For me the interesting thing is to contrast this with the usual way in which RM systems (and often RM as a whole) are marketed. Here it is being sold as a specific answer to a specific problem; rather than as an enterprise-wide ‘bucket’ and ill-defined answer to all information woes.

There is no mention of this system helping your police force to cope with FOI or vague promises to reduce costs. No, its selling points are its direct contribution to achieving the specific organisational targets on which senior managers are themselves judged. This is not RM as a universal panacea, nor RM as self-evidentially important. It is RM as a specifically designed niche solution to a niche problem in a niche market and as such is aggressively targeting a market which we seldom seem to reach.