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.
