Selling Records Management:
We have got a lot to Learn
The Scots, English, North Americans, Australians and French were in accord at the 4th International Records Management congress in Edinburgh. When it comes to selling ourselves, we archives and records managers have got a lot to learn.
The theme of the highly successful conference jointly sponsored by the Records Management Society of Great Britain (RMS) and the International Records Management Council (IRMC) in April was grandly stated as "Records Management into the next Millennium - the Global Perspective".
But the lasting message from many of the national and international speakers was that records managers have much to do to ensure occupancy of their rightful place in commerce and industry.
The Keeper of the Record of Scotland, Patrick Cadell, started it when he opened the conference in Edinburgh's smart Sheraton Grand Hotel. He told the 100 international delegates that information professionals would have to work hard at public relations. He said:
"The archivist is often viewed as a kind of intellectual long-stop, the ultimate guardian of the barrier between memory and oblivion. The records manager is given the mad professor role of determining what that memory actually is.
"Our problem is that we meet in gatherings such as this and much good sense is spoken, original and valuable ideas are produced, but we are like goldfish in a bowl – beautiful, but circulating amongst ourselves and essentially out of contact with the outside world"
He said that it was vital for information workers to be appreciated and accepted for the expertise they brought to their work and the value they added to the business of those who employed them. It was as important that they also connect with people who did not employ them.
"The real challenge that lies ahead of us is not technical or professional, it is simply that of converting a world which, let us not deceive ourselves, is made up largely of unbelievers, to an appreciation that the work of the records manager and archivist is not merely valuable, but actually essential to the efficiency of all business and administrations."
Three days later, at the conference's close, a former president of the IRMC, American management consultant Fred Diers, vice-president of information management for Archer Management Services, had a message that drove the point firmly home. He was, he said, appalled at the user concept of records management. Individuals could change this but the RM professional bodies were not doing the job, otherwise people would know what records management was.
"Records managers must redefine their role in business," he said. "They can utilise their knowledge and methodologies to play a key role in managing electronic 'soft copy' which, with other related issues, is going to be the records and information management issue of the future.
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" Records managers … will only be restrained by your traditional self-perception,"
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"To survive, records managers must become involved by introducing integrated accession standards, compliance control and risk reduction. The traditional roles and responsibilities of records management must be realigned to the new organisational imperatives. "You will only be restrained by your traditional self-perception," he said.
Fred had answers, too. He offered a plan for what he called records management's "partnership with key users". He told delegates: "You have to move out of the file room and go to the desk top work station. We must understand partnership goals, learn key operating constraints, join in analysis to improve current information accessibility and assist any way we can, everything from plugging holes in the dam to managing the whole information river."
Australian David Moldrich, a senior manager with Deloitte and Touche in Melbourne and chairman of the committee that created the Australian Records Management Standard AS4390, described what he called "technology enabled knowledge". He showed the differences in records management between the 1980's and the present:
Dramatic increases in PC and modem penetration as PCs approach mass market status;
He outlined the emerging technologies and issues that should be engaging records managers, including "value-added information", a follow-on from information resource management. He also high-lighted dynamic compound documents containing a variety of information formats including video and audio; document linking and its impact on version control, and concerns over ownership of intellectual property, including that of "virtual documents".
He urged records managers to press for information management plans within their organisations. He said: "The information management plan describes what information and why the organisation must collect it in meeting its business aims and objectives. It must not be confused with any information technology strategic plan, or others, which describe how, sometimes when and where, the information needs to be collected."
The information management plan must be part of corporate planning, he said. It should be owned by either the chief executive, board of directors, company secretary or equivalent and must not be part of an IT strategic plan.
He said: "In combination, the information management plan and the IT strategic plan will describe the design specifications for an information management system and must embrace information ownership and resource management, sekectivity and risk management and requirement-based technology."
London consultant Dr David Best, a partner at the Deloitte and Touche Consulting Group, sounded the call to records management, too. He said: "Information management is talked about in business and management level.
"More than 50 per cent of businesses recognise information management as a useful activity. In a sample we took recently, 39 per cent spend four percent or more of their turn over on information management, 27 per cent spend one to three percent. There are increases in conferences and publications on the subject and an awareness of its importance."
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"Records management is seen as an esoteric, backroom task. It is still perceived as a clerical activity and its value is poorly understood."
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Dr Best said that there was a growing interest in creating good information management practice. The Information Management Awards in 1996 had attracted 250 delegates. Last year 500 came and this year 1,000 were expected. But he warned: "For records management, this awareness is less. Records management is seen as an esoteric, backroom task. It is still perceived as a clerical activity and its value is poorly understood."
New trends in methodologies and technologies though were giving hope of changes. Increasingly, information as the fourth resource was being seen as a useful concept. New methods of documenting systems recognised information, not just data and technical architectures within systems were beginning to recognise the primacy of information.
Dr Best said. "Information and records are being recognised as a repository of real value. Methods to recognise, catalogue and utilise the resource are growing and technology to support these outcomes is getting into place. Awareness of these trends and training to cope with them are the key."
Most conference speakers challenged delegates to grasp the opportunities and initiatives of the new information technologies. Consultant Jake Knoppers, an adviser to the Canadian Task Force on Electronic Commerce, presented a perspective on high-level corporate information management principles and policies relevant to records management and electronic data interchange (EDI), which he defined as "e-commerce and e-business".
He said: "EDI involves taking a business-based approach to the activities of an organisation in its provisioning and/or purchasing of good and/or services. It also, on the whole, is transaction-based and focuses on exchanges of sets of pre-defined and structured data among two or more organisation.
"From a records management perspective, EDI is a form of recorded information, i.e., electronic records, which must be managed on behalf of the organisation throughout the whole life cycle."
He said that records managers could play a key supporting role in ensuring a harmonised approach for both hard and "soft" records, and the application of records retention and disposal scheduling.
British records manager, Jean Samuel, a research and development information analyst with Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, discussed the impact of Intranets - business's private, fire-walled sectors of the Internet. She warned: "Why do I raise this topic? Intranets involve the use of common, cheap technology and are changing the way records creators are acting. It follows, that it is also changing the way records mangers must act because no-one else is covering it."
Intranets were providing users with higher distribution speeds, the ease of pre-set access controls, document integrity and an end to the need for re-filing. The gains for records managers were more clearly-defined masters, single filing systems and a better focus for retention scheduling.
The head of the Barclays Bank U.K. Records Services, Peter Emmerson's "Trends in Records Management" paper continued the main theme. He said: "Records management should be at the heart of the business. We must get out there and talk to people about what records management is and what it can do." He said that with the accelerating growth in electronic records came more demands for intellectual controls, reduced emphasis on physical control and a wider understanding of "value added" possibilities.
He forecast greater opportunities for records management from the growth of EDI, the "colonisation" of the Internet by business, increasing automated "just-in-time" manufacture, mass customisation and single-point contact with the customer. And he predicted websites becoming official records, the slow death of imaging, retention management on intranets and the creation of electronic record registries.
The newly-appointed RMS Records Manager of the Year, 1998, Chester, England, consultant Richard Bennett, spoke of the mighty changes in business and industry that were creating massive challenges for records and information managers. The triggers to change, he said, were events like restructuring, relocation, mergers, take-over and privatisation, contracting out and down-sizing, compliance issues and IT infrastructure investment. All these were creating new ways of working, less central control, flatter management structures greater opportunities for sharing, trusting and risk-taking.
The technological changes were forcing changes in human nature, threatening the continuity, security and comfort of the in-house file-keeping emperors, the "brain of the business". Now records were becoming more accessible, more portable, single source records with currency and accuracy. All these combined to require records managers to think and work electronically while still managing hard copy paper.
A former president and chief executive officer of ARMA, David Stephens, vice-president of Idaho records management and software consultancy, Zasio Enterprises, warned that while traditional organisational processes worked fairly well during the era in which records management was not technology driven, now the paradigm was shifting.
He said: "The problem is that the traditional placements poorly position the records management discipline to make a successful transition from managing visible media to managing electronic record-keeping systems of the present and the future. In a world where business record-keeping is increasingly, even predominantly electronic, IT departments own the playing field and they define the rules of the game, at least to a large extent.
"If record management programmes do not report to the Chief Information Officer or some other IT executive, their long-term future is problematic. To a large degree, the profession's future viability hinges on this issue. This paradigm shift is now occurring, albeit slowly."
But he offered this answer: "In order for records management to have a future, it must immediately reposition itself as the professional discipline for managing electronic records in computer environments. With respect to its ability to achieve this objective, the records management discipline has many weakness, but it also has some unique strengths.
"Alone among the many disciplines for the fragmented field of information management, records management is the only discipline which has a solution to the problems of the uncontrolled growth of records -- records retention.
"Because of the exploding growth of electronic records, electronic records retention must become a key component of the data life cycle management strategy of every enterprise. This paradigm shift represents a tremendous opportunity for records management in the coming decades."
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"The future is a new millennium with all the challenges and opportunities it will bring. There can be nobody better placed to provide a solid foundation for progress than the records manager."
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French documentalist and information science professor Catherine Fluzin brought a European continent perspective to the congress saying: "The document engineering development is an answer to the needs of the company in order to develop its information, increase the quality and guarantee the memory of the firm. This development requires several well-known activities that are the records management, the document information management and quality management.
"We can therefore say that the records management notion lies in three jobs:
U.S. records management practitioner Lee Pendergraft, a regional operations manager for Archer Management Services, called for a code of ethics for records and information management. He enumerated a number of "characteristic common to all authentic professions", including theoretical principles; specialised practical skills; substantial education and training; client service as the primary practice; recognition of a commitment to the greater good of society at large and professional standards of ethics.
He said: "To achieve greater recognition as professionals, record-keeping and information management practitioners must demonstrate the relationship of their field to these characteristics and, especially, the relevance of their occupation within a greater social context. Adhering to a code of ethics that embodies social values is a primary step.
"When these characteristics are combined with an awareness of greater aspirations for the momentum of an organisation's impact on social values and the membership endorses this action, the membership makes progress toward achieving the status of sanctioned professionals."
The conference's opening speaker, Scottish Keeper of Records Patrick Cadell, provides both the head and the tale of this review. His speech concluded on a rousing, positive theme: "The whole purpose of our existence, whether we consider ourselves archivists or records managers, is to preserve and make accessible the records of the past, perhaps for immediate use, perhaps for long-term preservation.
"Our aim must be to make this information available both to the decision makers of today, those whose work may well have far reaching effects on our future and to their successors who in time to come will wish to know how certain decisions were arrived at and why.
"It is not our contemporaries who should judge us, it is the future generations. I am far more concerned about what will be said about me in 50 years than I am about today.
"The records of our activities reveal the past, explain the present and guide the future. The future is a new millennium with all the challenges and opportunities it will bring. There can be nobody better placed to provide a solid foundation for progress than the records manager."
Michael Steemson's paper to the conference on the legal admissibility
of electronic documents may be found at …
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 Michael Steemson |
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