It struck me again how big a challenge recordkeepers have within organisations. To be successful and useful, staff must save all the relevant documents into the system.

If only 20% of documents are archived, the system is a failure. If 50% are saved, the system is a failure. (Who would look in an “authoritative archive” when 1 in 2 documents are likely to be missing?) If 80% are saved, the system gets a bare pass (that’s still 1 in 5 documents missing from the collection.)

This makes adoption imperative, and highlights how hard it is to demonstrate success in the early (and later!) stages of rolling out the recordkeeping system.

For me, this means I’d prefer to have 100% of just five types of documents, rather than 20% of everything. At least then I could say to staff “For these five things, look in the recordkeeping system because they’re all there. For everything else, we’re getting to that.” This is a very different approach to training every staff member, hoping for the best, and only getting 20% of what’s needed.

What do you think? Worth trying?

Their needs were fairly straightforward:

• Take documents stored in the RMS, select the desired ones via the CMS, and publish them seamlessly to the public website.
• Locally cache copies of the documents to reduce the impact on the RMS, and automatically refresh the local copy when the RMS version is updated.
• Allow site visitors to fill in online forms, and store this data directly in the RMS to meet recordkeeping requirements.

It’s lucky that this project has been going very slowly, as a year ago (when they last had time to consider getting a new CMS), there were almost no products in the market that could meet this need out of the box. Thankfully there are now a (small) handful of solutions that can do this, mostly Australian-developed products.

This is a common requirement, amongst government agencies, local councils, and compliance-driven firms. This would be slam-dunk during the sales process for these types of organisations. At yet, capabilities in the CMS marketplace are weak at best.

Why do more CMS products not offer simple integration with records management systems?

When they do have this capability, why don’t they market it?

Like many organisations, the Council had a flood of snail mail letters coming in and going out, all of which needed to be scanned and saved into the records management system (EDRMS). The goal: eliminate 90% of the physical letters going out, replacing them with emails, also saved into the EDRMS.

Now, as he put it, recordkeepers can tend to be a bit, well, shy. Not normally best suited for going out and talking with people.

So he sent the entire recordkeeping team on an eight week Toastmasters course. With their new found confidence, he sent them out into the organisation to talk to people one-on-one. They visited everyone who routinely sent out printed mail, explained to them the benefits of replacing this with email, and showed them how to use the systems.

The result: mission accomplished. A huge drop in snail mail, and big increases in productivity for all involved.

I love this for many reasons. It’s simple, achieving a corporate objective without fanfare, one person at a time. It recognises the human side, both for the recordkeeping team and general staff. It’s thinking out of the box, not afraid to stray outside of traditional technology, training or policy approaches. It also gives the recordkeeping team skills for life, and shows them respect.

Have you seen something similar?

So you’ve chosen the right records management (RM) package, got the smartest developers in your firm to design and develop the solution, and today you successfully went into production with the application. Lo and behold, it works! High five’s all around! You start procuring copious amounts of champagne for the celebratory party.

Problem is, you’ll wake up tomorrow with a headache that’s not just from the bubbly. Some users will chafe at having to change cherished ways of working. You’ll have to deal with an inevitable surge of support and enhancement requests. Your IT department may begin a series of risky configuration changes. And then you’ll discover rafts of new and different content types to deal with.