Pelz-Sharpe Alan Pelz-Sharpe

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SOA and Records Management

5-Jun-2009

Tags: , Document Management (ECM), Governance, Implementation, Industry Standards, Information Architecture, Services Oriented Architecture, Government

An announcement caught attention the other week, though I don't have much insight into the details yet. In short a new RM (Records Management) standard has emerged via NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) and OMG (Object Management Group), and it's a particularly interesting one.

The 'Records Management Services Technical Specification' provides a standard for the Federal US Government, but just like DOD 5015 this might well have much broader reach and value outside of Government. In essence this is a SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) specification that provides a framework for defining and ultimately re-using web services throughout an enterprise to provide full end-to-end record lifecycle management.

As subscribers to our ECM Suites research know, RM technologies are often limited in their reach to particular repositories or systems. The theory here is to provide some common web services that can be utilized wherever RM functionality is needed, regardless of location, and to enable truly centralized RM. It's a lofty but important goal, and frankly RM as of today is not a consideration in most SOA architectures. If this succeeds as a standard that could start to change.

I for one hope it does succeed, but without further studying the documentation and seeing it tested in the real world we can't know for sure how well it might work or be adopted. Nevertheless, it is an interesting development and one we will watch with interest.

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