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Alan Pelz-Sharpe

Cri Du Coeur for Records Management

4-Aug-2010

Tags: Document Management (ECM), E-mail Archiving and Management, SharePoint Ecosystem, Building Business Case, Governance, Legal

If you were to trust in the marketing swill that comes out of the vendor and analyst community these days, you would believe that large organizations are not just embracing ERM (Electronic Records Management) but that they are positively hugging and kissing it too.  You might believe that organizations driven by urgent compliance needs are enthusiastically managing and archiving large SharePoint installations, and are having meaningful discussions about how to deal with Web 2.0 content, having already taken control of the e-mail mountain. 

This is of course complete and utter rubbish. SharePoint sites continue to grow unabated,  and nobody has even started to deal properly with e-mail as a record, let alone the plethora of technologies that Web 2.0 encompasses. You can certainly find examples of brave souls who have made progress if you look hard enough, but they are the equivalent of a few grains of sand on a beach.

Legal has zero clue what IT actually does (beyond provide a poor quality helpdesk). Records Managers have nobody's ear but the RM community. Business thinks it knows best and listens to no one. Ironically the vendor community is for once the voice of reason here. Strip away the marketing hype, and vendors have made huge progress (as our research details) to deliver solutions that can actually provide excellent ERM capabilities in today's highly fragmented and ever growing enterprises. Although product offerings vary subantially among individual vendors, the problem does not lie with the technology.

What matters, more, though, is who's going to fix the situation? More specifically, where does one start to fix something that is so terribly broken?

In my personal opinion the place to start is at the beginning, and to question ERM's "raison d'etre."  Once upon a time office workers made use of filing clerks, who in turn made use of  cabinets, folders, and file plans. Information was managed, and no one needed to know the magic behind it, it just worked.  When you needed to get hold of a piece of information the filing clerk would get it for you, and when you needed to dispose of information the filing clerk would likewise oblige. When you moved onto better things or fell under the proverbial bus, you did so safe in the knowledge that the next person could pick up (information-wise at least) where you left off.  Not so in today's office: information gets lost, information gets hoarded unnecessarily, and when you transition upward or onward, you often leave the equivalent of an information black hole behind you.

The role of managing information through its lifecycle to destruction is arguably more relevant, vital, and important today than it has ever been, but who's responsibility is it? Records Managers are considered impractical and out of touch with modern reality, IT is clueless but sounds clever ("don't worry it's all backed up....."). Business listens to no one; instead they believe they have the task in hand via their zip drives and desktop search.

I am not sure if my need to rant today is connected in someway to the recent discovery online of a photograph of myself from my days in the Army, and my subsequent visit to the Military Museum in Winchester. In turn possibly stirring up a deep seated need to rally the troops, or more likely in my case to start an armed insurrection. But whatever it is, I do passionately believe that the time is long overdue to have a battle royale over what ERM should be, as opposed to what it currently is or is not. A clean slate is required, and fresh ideas based on the reality of overwhelming volumes of information are essential to the debate.