EDRM using Sharepoint

Roger Smethurst's engaging look at how DEFRA brought in an EDRM system...well, how they harvested their electronic records...(geddit??) using customised Sharepoint applications.


They didn't want a onesizefitsall EDRM system because DEFRA is a diverse aggregation of government departments. People work in different ways, different parts of the organisation work differently, so they need to work with this difference and not force everyone to work in the same way. But there's also a big need to work collaboratively...so they looked at Sharepoint which they thought would meet their needs.


There are 3 building blocks within Sharepoint they worked with mysite, teamsite (workspace) and RM.


Roger pointed out that users aren't records managers...(where have I heard that before?) Users want their work to be easy, reusable and portable; records managers want to organise, to put stuff in one place, managing it with rich metadata....with lifecycle management. Users just want to get on with their work.


Users hate fileplans...RMs like them cos they add order. But web portals add urls which users do like and understand. If you can use automated record capture, the users will love you for it. Well, maybe love is too strong a word for it...but you get my drift.




They used Mysite to manage the appraisal (IPR) process.


Record declaration from teamsites, document libraries are declared and sent to a record repository, router sorts it via access controls, to a record centre.


Less burden for end users, but more responsibility for RMs. Not just about technology it's abt adapting to the change.


3 options for object type based on the level of its importance...high, medium, low. It's the only metadata users had to enter. There was a huge educaion programme with the roll out of this.

I'm fascinated with this approach and would love to see it in action. I do share TNA's reservations about it though. For one thing it still doesn't link well with email. What was Microsoft thinking? Access rights are difficult. And if you don't manage it properly you can, if you're not careful, end up with Sharepoint sprawl. A mass of unstructured unrelated data that's grown despite your best efforts to manage it.


Nevertheless, Roger's energetic presentation and his undoubted enthusiam for his subject created a lot of interest from the floor...delegates were really keen to understand how it works. As its based on Microsoft suite of tools we'll all be watching developments with great interest.

Blogs, blogging and online communities

Intro

What have you signed up for?
How many of you know what a blog is?
How many of you have blogs?
How many of you contribute to blogs?
How many of you read blogs?
How many of you have read mine?

The challenge of technology is not new. Medieval Helpdesk

Blogs in plain English

Challenges for blogs and RM?

Web2,0 stuff.

Online communities of interest.

Discussion boards.

Modernising RMS.

Collaborative session RM in 2012

These are rough notes...I'll tart it up later. Suffice to say, the challenge was to look at how we can manage the environment of the future in ways that benefit ourselves and our organisations. Where will we be in 2012?

Sharepoint v EDRM

James...who will win? SP or EDRM?

Almost unanimous.

SP is easy to roll out, train, intuitive. Probs and pleasures of SP. Easy to use but - where's the governance? How do you manage the proliferastion of all the new team sites. Are we creating silos2.0?

IT within orgs like the thrill of the new. MS has a lot of stuff going for it. But more highly regulated environments may still need EDRM.

Guardians or enablers?

Will erm systems still be here in 7 years?The future is assistive technology? It's the wrong way round. Relational classification. Hierarchical systems will go. Tagging will take over. Hosted services will structure and order info/records. Using controlled lists; autoclassification is the next step. Self evolving, thesaurus builders not RMs. Will we be the Information management society?

How do we manage info / facilitating business need?

ERM interfaces are inhibiting. How can we let users have a better experience? Can we automate everything? How to introduce RM agenda into orgs that don't want to play? Outsourcing?

Collaborative environments...how do you control them? Regulate them?

Do we need the experts to tell us what to do? Each org needs to manage its own systems without the need for a man on a white charger coming along to save the day.

How do we engage senior staff to make sure we support our business? Regulation v the way that things really work. Civil Service not good at managing data, won't change now.

How do we get from where we are to this new environment?

What will individuals be doing? What shd indivs be doing?



Well, it depends on business needs. The changes aren't necessarily user driven. Changes are IT driven. We haven't engaged the users properly. IT and RM need to be seamlessly linked. RM are the links between users and IT.



Need IM/RM strategies. But RM is always down the list of priorities for orgs. Need to influence people at the right grade etc. Info is your second biggest resource. Some orgs treat RM like smoking, drink driving - it's not going to be me that's hit.



Risk management is a key factor. What abt managing email mment? Websites have out of date info on them. We shd try to build in tools that will manage these systems...acknowledging the risk is crucial.


Policies, procedures, principles and training.


How are we gonna do naming conventions on tags? People do it for their immedtiate needs not conveniently for records managers.


Get in at the beginning not the end.


Internal audits are good ways of ensuring compliance.


Can we rethink the lifecycle of records?



Endless storage or active/inactive documents. Managing lifecycles. Seamless flow in TNA. All info is valid not just that which you consider to be so.



How do we decide on what to archive? Archive when it's not needed rather than for a set period of time. If you're saving stuff...move them to archive x months/years after it was last used. What abt finance docs? Much easier than policy stuff.



Local information champions. People aren't records managers they have a day job.



Is the term 'record' useful anymore? is it just active/inactive stuff?



EDRM systems are integrating closer with SP environments. EDRM won't be obsolete it'll evolve just like MS tools have evolved.

RM community needs to be able to influence edrm systems.

From YouTube to YouManage

Steve Bailey kicked off conference in fine style. (Click on the title to go to the full text of Steve's talk)

Iconoclastic and challenging as ever, Steve looked at the techno-centric world we live in...and reminded us that records managers don't live in a vacuum. His argument is that the user community is increasingly developing its own ways of working with retention schedules, tags and deciding on the importance of documents.


Information creators don't work in the same way as they did two, three, five years ago. Or even how they did it last week. None of us are now just passsive users of content.


What implications does that have for records managers? RM can be a conservative profession, that needs to adapt to this technologically changing environment to make sure we keep up.


Typically erudite and forthright Steve, warned us that records managers need to change with the times or be left behind. Our methodologies have to move with the times. Free online tools from such as Google are changing the way we work. Witness the way we are moving towards collaborative tools ...Office2.0... Blogs, wikis etc are just a sideshow...


Mass digital storage is challenging traditional records management. He pointed out the value of older docs as part of a story...in this environment is there a no need for r&d schedules?

Steve's own blog fundamentally challenges what a record is and who it belongs to. He notes the boundaries beween work and home life are blurring. Content is incresingly being stored on places like Flickr, youtube, delicious etc.

For Steve, technology shapes the way organisations function.

I love the work Steve is doing, it's important, challenging and enormously valuable. But yet I still wonder... what about the corporate memory of the organisation? Steve looks at the interface between users and technology and shows us where records managers can either fit in or lose out. My big concern is that he doesn't seem to address what organisations need as effectively as what users need.


Steve points out that applications are becoming both more complex and more numerous. He recognises that the new web2.0 stuff represents a paradigm shift the like of which we have never seen. Can we master this domain? How can we rethink RM in this environment? Can RM still be fit for purpose in this environment? Not by using traditional methods. He wonders whether traditional approaches the best or just the easiest...are we a stuffy rules bound profession? Not in my experience. It's a dynamic, exciting environment where all of us are experienced, if not expert in managing change.


For Steve RM isn't the future...no longer do we manage records...we need to rethink RM for the new world of Web2.0. We need a set of organising principles looking at how we can democratise info management in the same way we have democratised info creation. What we need is Records management 2.0


We're moving to a world where user tagging is better than classification schemes. Tagging gets more reliable the more users use it. We have to find ways of coping with harnessing the innovative wisdom of the crowd. In my experience we don't want to be giving users a new and shiny way of misnaming everything. Hahaha.


We do live in exciting and challenging times. One of the ways forward is for the opinions of the user and the RM to work closer together in harmony.


The umbrella of Web2.0 will affect our ability to manage the future. We need to have these important debates that Steve has rightly highlighted and, what's more we need to have them with our IT suppliers.

Getting started

Conference kicked off this evening with a meeting of all the Regional and Special Interest Group Chairs.

A positive and affirming meeting highlighting the progress we're making as an organisation. The Regional and Special Interest Groups are doing great work but we need to remember the corporate thing. We are one RMS.

Paul Dodgson noted that we need to keep up the momentum. In a moving call-to-arms, he pointed out that we are an inclusive family, dedicated to the success of each other and all of the Society. Well, it brought a lump to my throat, I don't mind telling you. It was a moving speech, enough to bring a tear to a glass eye.

Joking aside, we're all delighted with the progress the Society is making. . .so join us.

More later... is that a pint I can hear calling?

Welcome to conference

Hi everyone...welcome to Edinburgh.

The weather looks good.

I've just been checking out the conference facilities and I'm really impressed! Our conference organisers are doing a cracking job. The venue is superb.

Everyone's raring to go...

I've just heard that the Collaboration sessions are fully booked!!!

I'll be blogging the whole conference so watch this space....

Records management in the post-modern world

For as long as I can remember there has been a strong and coherent orthodoxy within records management.

In the days before the networked computer this orthodoxy centred around the life-cycle of paper records: teams would keep their records near them while they were working on the files or consulting them regularly, after that the organisation would take the files and store them for as long as they were needed.

During the 1990s the international records management standard, ISO 15489 was written. The standard attempted to bridge the gap between paper records and electronic records by coming up with a statement of best practice that could be applied in either environment. It is so format-neutral that part one of the standard does not even contain the word 'e-mail'.

For ISO 15489 the role of records managers is to :
- build business classifications (which identify business functions and break them down into activities
- map out all the record keeping requirements around those activities (what records need to kept, how long do they need to be kept for, who needs access to them etc.)
-design records systems that apply the classification and the accompanying records requirements to records

The National Archives (TNA) took the ideas of ISO 15489 and hard-wired them into the document that created and defined EDRM: TNA 2002: functional requirements for electronic records mangaement systems. Systems compliant with TNA 2002 had to be able to hold an organisation's business classification scheme and link retention and access rules to it.

For the first five years of this century this orthodoxy held unchallenged sway. Most of us in the proffession were either:

a) implementing EDRM

b) trying to get the funds to implement EDRM

or c) smarting because we didn't get the funds to implement EDRM.

Over the last two years cracks have started to appear in the orthodoxy. The orthodoxy itself has been proved to be sound: Numerous large and important institutions have sucessfully implemented EDRM. But it has also proved unable to become a universal model. EDRM projects are large scale, complex, long running and resource-hungry. Unless an organisation is prepared to devote a considerable amount of effort, energy, attention and money to the project they stand a significant chance of failure.

The decision of DEFRA to chose SharePoint (Moss 2007) as their corporate document management system is significant . It signals that Microsoft's position in the desktop software market is so strong that they can win Central Government business withough needing to seek the stamp of approval from compliance with TNA 2002(nor, one presumes, will they need to seek compliance with MoReq2, the forthcoming European testing regime .)

The records management model underpinning MOSS 2007 is vastly different from the records management orthodoxy. Teams can set up 'sites' in which they can have a document library with a folder structure. But there is no place in SharePoint for the organisation to hold and manage a business classification scheme to organise all these sites and all the document libraries contained in these sites. Instead documents needed as records can be duplicated and routed to a seperate area of the SharePoint installation (called a records centre) where retention rules can be applied.

DEFRA have taken the challenge of adapting SharePoint for records management extremely seriously, and have made considerable customisations to the 'out of the box' system. Roger Smethurst, Defra's Chief Information Officer, will open the second day of the 2008 Records Management Conference (Tuesday 22 April) by talking us through DEFRA's experiences so far.

The second challenge to the orthodoxy has come from web 2.0: developments in the world wide web that now mean it is as easy to publish information on the web as it is to read it, and it is as easy to save documents in personal space on the world wide web as it is to save them onto your organisation's servers .

The challenge this poses to our orthodoxy has been most cogently expressed by Steve Bailey, in his blog Records Management FutureWatch . Steve has asked whether Records management will be left behind by web 2.0, as people save their documents into their own space on web applications such as Google docs, rather than on the records systems their organisations have set up for them. Steve will give the opening keynote speach of the 2008 RMS conference by talking through what Web 2.0 means for records management and how our profession might respond.

Despite these challenges to our orthodoxy, we are still a coherent profession, as the continued existence and growth of the Records Management Society throughout this period testifies. We have asked Britain's foremost acedemic in the records management field, Julie McLeod , to adress the following question:

'given Web 2.0, SharePoint, and the difficulties some organisations have had with EDRM, what next for the fundamental priniciples that inform our professional outlook?'

Her talk 'Records management principles in the post-modern world' will be the closing keynote speach of the 2008 Conference.