Articles by Category: Document & records management

Compliance is a dirty word

Alan Pelz-Sharpe has written about the issues with compliance. To quote:

If there is one word I hate to hear used in this industry it's the word compliance.

To me it's like fingernails down a blackboard, and frankly if I never hear it used again then I would be a happy man. Of course I have to endure the word in virtually every article and vendor press release I read. I don't like the word because it is a blanket term that used without context is totally meaningless, yet it's a word (much like governance) that sounds impressive and few people in the room will admit that they don't really understand it. Well let me be among the first to point out the the Compliance Emperor often has no clothes.

Posted by jamesr at 10:00 AM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management, Information management, Intranets

Bottom-up approach to taxonomy development

Simon Goh has written about a bottom-up approach to taxonomy development. To quote:

In my previous post, I brought up a topic on the implementation challenges of taxonomy and suggested a few points on overcoming pitfalls for multi-faceted taxonomy implementation. This time round, my reflection is based on ground 0, where there is no corporate taxonomy design to start with. This idea requires incremental and continuous investment and its not a short project period affair. Like the Chinese saying goes, "Cast a long line to catch a bigger fish".

Posted by jamesr at 07:00 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management, Document & records management, Information architecture

Implementation challenges of taxonomies

Simon Goh has written an entry on the implementation challenges of taxonomies. To quote:

The number one issue now is to avoid complex metadata profiling. It is a nightmare for staff to browse the tree of each taxonomy facet to profile a document uploaded. Profile it once, twice and if he is patient enough, he will stop at the third time. And thereafter, you will expect the remainder of the documents to be in his local drive, circulated through emails. How do we avoid this pitfall?

Posted by jamesr at 07:15 AM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management, Information architecture

Records management and KM

Julian Carver reports on a talk in New Zealand on records management and knowledge management. To quote:

Sarah Heal presented today for NZKM in Christchurch on Records Management as a part of KM Strategy. Over the last year she has detected some unexpected and at times inconvenient signals, a growing body of anecdotal evidence that something is not quite right in information management. There have been lots of failed IM/KM initiatives, and EDRMS is the “Emperor with no clothes”. There just aren’t any really good exemplars in NZ of very successful deployments. With project budgets often ranging from $0.5 million to $1 million, this is an expensive problem.

Posted by jamesr at 09:27 AM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management, Knowledge management

Recordkeeping responsibilities on a single sheet of paper

With the move from paper to electronic documents, responsibility for recordkeeping within organisations has shifted to individual staff and away from centralised records management specialists.

Much is made of the need for all staff to understand their recordkeeping responsibilities. To this end, many training and communication programs are conducted within government agencies (and elsewhere).

To a large extent, this training has failed. While staff gain a general awareness of recordkeeping, they are not provided with sufficiently concrete and detailed guidance to make their recordkeeping successful and consistent.

This article explores ways to help staff meet their recordkeeping obligations by creating a single sheet of paper for each staff member with everything that they need to know.

Traditional recordkeeping training

Most organisations have fairly well-established staff training programs on recordkeeping, covering topics such as:

• what is a record
• why records need to be kept
• recordkeeping obligations of all staff
• how to file records in corporate record keeping systems
• when and how to dispose of records

Crucially, this training only talks of records in general terms, outlining statements such as 'records are any documents that provide evidence of a decision or activity'. In practice, not every document or email should be kept, and these general statements do little to help staff make judgements about what to file.

The training also fails to tell staff where to file individual records, other than generally pointing to the corporate records systems.

[CM Briefing 2007-08, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr at 04:02 PM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management, James' articles

Presentation: Enhancing the potential of your taxonomy (Sydney)

I gave a presentation today at the Enhancing the potential of your taxonomy conference in Sydney. This was on "Understanding and evaluating your taxonomy", covering:

• Three goals of a taxonomy
• Records management case study
• Information architecture
• Card-based classification evaluation

Understanding and evaluating your taxonomy (PDF, 477kb)

Posted by jamesr at 06:29 PM | Permalink
Categories: Conferences & presentations, Document & records management, Information architecture

Unleashing the power of open source in document management

Seth Gottlieb and Sebastian Wohlrapp have written a whitepaper on open source document management systems. To quote:

The open source community has produced a number of useful, high quality content management systems which presents an opportunity to deliver tailored content management solutions without the high licensing or management fees associated with commercially-licensed or hosted software. However, the sheer number of open source CMS projects and the ineffectualness of traditional commercial software selection techniques can make the task of finding the right open source software an intimidating challenge. The strategy of using feature matrices is particularly ill-suited to open source software selection. A more practical approach is to match your needs to a common business problem that others have solved using open source software and engage with the community to learn about their experiences in implementing the solution. Doing so will take advantage of the unique aspects of open source software: the openness of the user community and the transparency of the development process.

Posted by jamesr at 11:16 AM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management

Federated records management - the next check-off box?

Priscilla Emery has written a blog entry introducing "federated records management", a concept I haven't come across before. To quote:

Federated RM can be extremely useful for those organizations that have a variety of document repositories in place and don't want to have to go through the hassle of migrating the pieces or whole parts of the legacy base to a proprietary RM system. But buyer beware.

Posted by jamesr at 11:31 AM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management, Information management

Records management: specifications, certifications, and compliance

Priscilla Emery has published an article (actually an excerpt) that discusses records management certifications, and their relevance when selecting a product. To quote:

Some people co-equate specifications and certifications, but in fact, certifications go beyond defining a standard or set of specifications. Certification bodies use specifications as a set of criteria for testing and qualifying vendors and other parties as compliant with the set of defined specifications. Certification implies both a rigorous set of specifications together with a rigorous testing procedure and set process for demonstrating a product's worthiness to be certified.

Many buyers prefer to acquire certified products because it means that the software has been tested against a baseline set of specifications to be worthy of further review. It tends to aid in the evaluation process when software has gone through some hoops to get a "nod" by non-partisan and reputable agencies or authorities.

Posted by jamesr at 07:03 AM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management

Providing intranet access to records

Many organisations are attempting to clarify the relationship between the corporate intranet, and their document/records management system. While this is a broader issue of information management with an organisation, there are some short-term activities that can be taken to create a working relationship between these two platforms.

This briefing outlines a simple scenario in which the intranet helps staff find key corporate information, while the documents accessed are stored in the document/records management system.

Usage scenario

The following scenario outlines one of the typical ways an intranet is used:

A staff member browses into the HR section, and then to the 'HR policies' page. Scanning through the list of documents available, the leave policy is selected, and the PDF opens up in Acrobat Reader.

This is a very common scenario, but more could be happening behind the scenes than is apparent to the end user.

[Read the full article.]

Posted by jamesr at 02:07 PM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management, Intranets, James' articles

The challenge for records management vendors

I recently finished an "information management and records management" review in a small public-sector agency. One of the findings was that while they needed a records management system (RMS), they couldn't proceed with the system they had due to its major usability problems.

This accords my experiences in other organisations: notably that there has been a 100% failure rate of rolling out records management systems (with some exceptions, such as legal firms). In my earlier article, I identified three critical success factors: the system, classification scheme and message.

Focusing on the system: records management systems are perfectly designed for their original users, specialist records managers. They are complex, powerful and efficient when used all day, every day.

The world, however, has changed. We now expect general staff throughout an organisation to be filing records, and they are frankly terrified by records management systems (and rightly so). I would argue that recordkeeping cannot succeed until the usability problems of RMS products are address.

So the challenge for RMS vendors: if they want to survive into the long-term, then recordkeeping projects need to succeed. While "compliance" is driving deployment at present, the fact that 100% of projects fail to gain adoption is going to impact upon the survival of the marketplace as a whole.

If I was a RMS vendor, I would be spending a lot of effort transforming my product to match the changing nature of RM usage within organisations.

This would include:

• Working closely with selected clients to develop standard personas that describe who will be using the RMS, their levels of experience, and the tasks they want to complete. This would undoubtedly identify that the major of users are RM "novices", with little interest in recordkeeping legislation.
• Reviewing current products, through the lens of the personas, to identify potential issues and solutions.
• Usability testing products to refine the interfaces, and to generally simplify the design.
• Focusing on making products "invisible" by integrating them more cleanly into other business applications.
• Building up "best practice" approaches to RM that focus on cultural change and adoption by staff, instead of leaving these issues entirely in the hands of clients.
• Strongly supporting groups such as Standards Australia, who are endeavouring to review and refine classification schemes and other RM approaches.
• Devoting a greatly increased amount of revenue to R&D.

The RM products haven't changed much for a long time now, but the world has. Now is the time for the RM vendors to kick-start a new round of design and innovation, otherwise the marketplace could easily slide back into oblivion when the current "compliance" hype subsides...

At the end of the day, vendors have to take some responsibility for the success (or failure) of organisations implementing RMS solutions. If projects keep failing (as they currently are), vendors should expect to eventually pay the price.

Posted by jamesr at 11:15 AM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management

What happens to staff if they don't do their recordkeeping?

We've been doing a bit more work in the area of records management recently, and I've been chatting to a fair few people about approaches. Our interest is not on the back-end aspects (retention, disposal, etc) but on the adoption of records management practices by staff throughout the organisation.

Mostly, organisations seem to have a single message that they use when communicating to staff:

"You must use the records management system, because it's extremely important that we meet our legislated requirements."

The question I ask however is: what happens to staff if they don't do records management? In your organisation, consider the answers to the following questions:

• Are staff rewarded for fulfilling their recordkeeping requirements?
• Are staff penalised for not doing recordkeeping?
• Are individual staff even assessed to determine whether they are meeting their obligations?
• Is recordkeeping included as part of the "performance evaluation" criteria set up (and assessed) by HR?
• Beyond the "number of documents added to the system each month", are there meaningful metrics on the overall usage of the records management system?

My point is this: we wave our hands about a lot, saying how "important" records management is. When it comes down to it, however, we don't actually do anything to ensure it really happens.

This sends a clear message to staff: this isn't really important, otherwise something bad would happen to me if I don't do it. I'm not saying that recordkeeping should be enforced, but I am highlighting the gap between words and actions. One way or another, these two things should be aligned.

(For more on this general topic, see my earlier article Rolling out a records management system.)

Posted by jamesr at 04:31 PM | Permalink
Categories: Document & records management