I received a curiously titled email the other day (it was a commercial sales one from Aiim, no doubt received by lots of records professionals, so no confidences being broken).

Its subject heading was ‘Do you run serious records management?’ (as opposed to what: trivial records management, fun records management?…) It was advertising a one day training event in Slough around Moreq2. Aside from the title, the email’s opening lines also struck me as interesting:

Does your organisation have a heavyweight records management obligation?
If so, MoReq2 - the Model Requirements Specification for the Management of Electronic Records - is something you need to know about.

I think this is probably the first time I have seen an open and ‘official’ admission that the kind of ‘heavyweight’ RM systems covered by Moreq and formally by the TNA testing regime are only likely to prove suitable in a limited number of specific, ‘niche’ areas. It definitely seems as though the days when EDRMS were being touted as the answer for organisations large and small and from every sector under the sun have well and truly gone for good. Certainly, despite its slightly odd tone, the email’s title also implies that we are witnessing a welcome return to the notion of ‘fitness for purpose’ when it comes to records management - rather than the recent assumption that ‘one size fits all’

There’s been a small flurry of reviews of Managing the Crowd being published over the past couple of weeks. It’s always fascinating (and a little daunting) reading what fellow professionals have to say about your work and I’ve been delighted - and relieved! - at the reception it has received. Thankfully the tone of most seems to be ‘I don’t necessarily agree with all you’ve had to say, but I’m really glad you said it’ which is exactly the response I was hoping for.

Anyway, for those interested in hearing what others have made of it I can point you in the direction of reviews by:
- James Lappin in the Records Management Society Bulletin Issue 46, November 2008
- Barbara Reed and Stephen Clarke in the latest RMAA IQ magazine
- Marieke Guy in Ariadne (available online - hurrah!)

My thanks to all those who have taken the time and trouble to publish their thoughts and views about the book and in doing so are helping to keep debate about the issues well and truly alive

It’s hard to ignore the ever growing pressure on organisations, particularly those in the public sector, to reduce the carbon footprint of their IT infrastructure. This culminated recently in Greening Government ICT, a 20 page paper produced by the Cabinet Office to help government departments to play their role.

It’s a mine of useful information, ranging from the simple and obvious (‘shutdown PCs after office hours’) to the technical (‘specify low power consumption central processing units and high efficiency power units’).

Point 18 in Annex B appears to offer promise to records managers everywhere by mentioning a ‘data centre audit’ as a recommended step to be taken before then spoiling it by clarifying that this is about where your servers should be located in a room to increase air supply rather than referring to any form of information audit as we would recognise.

The ‘Areas for potential carbon reduction’ does at least mention ‘Remove unnecessary/duplicated data or information’ as an action (though as point 44 of 51 its hardly given high priority). Even more tellingly it has nothing listed under ‘possible implementation methods’. How depressing is that for records management? Apparently the Cabinet Office know of no possible technique for identifying what information stored within an organistion is ‘unnecessary’ and can, therefore, be safely deleted? Isn’t that exactly what records management, and appraisal in particular, have to offer: a proven methodology for identifying what information still has value and must be retained and which can be safely removed?

What a missed opportunity.

In Chapter 9 of ‘Managing the Crowd’ I make the point that “Largely as a result of … technical advances, we now live in a world defined by information storage; ours is now a culture in which size most definitely matters. Just take each new generation of iPod that hits our shops. Have you ever seen an improved ability to decide what tracks you want to delete quoted as a selling point? No. The fact that it now has a 16Gb memory, compared with the 8Gb available last year, or the 4Gb the previous year, however, most definitely is”.

In this context it was interesting to read over the weekend that iPod will no longer be selling their 160GB iPod Classic. As the Daily Telegraph puts it, “ (perhaps) people have realised that, although the iPod has the potential to put their entire CD library in their pocket, they only ever listen to a few hundred favourite songs”. So maybe there are limits to our love affair with storage after all.

More interesting still, particularly in relation to Records Mgt 2.0, is the new ‘music-recommendation engine’ which the new Nano has built into it. According to the article by Claudine Beaumont “Genius will scan through your music collection looking at genres, the number of albums and songs you have by a particular artist, as well as the ratings you have given them. It will also look at the characteristics of the song itself, such as beats per minute… (it then) beams it back to the iTunes mothership. From there, it is able to build dynamic playlists of other recommended tracks, based not only on your library, but that of other iTunes users with similar tastes”.

So here we have the appraisal of large volumes of content based on information value and decided by a combination of both user opinion and user behaviour. Plus a system which combines the views and actions of the individual with those of the broader user community to provide a more informed analysis based on the ‘wisdom of the crowd’. Well whad’ya know. If we were talking about online business records, rather than music records, I’d say that Apple have just taken a pretty big stride towards realising Records Management 2.0.

Alan Bell raises some interesting issues in a recent posting about the wisdom (or not) of ‘Records Management2.0’ as term (see it here), his main argument being that although the technology and how we need to do things has changed this has not, and should not, change our fundamental goals and objectives and that as such “ all this talk of version 2.0 is perhaps not as helpful as it could be”.

As one of the first in using the phrase Records Management2.0 (though hardly original I must admit) it may strike you as surprising that I don’t really disagree with much of Alan’s argument.

Where Alan and I do differ, I believe, is in the degree of change required; whether this does or doesn’t justify the moniker ‘2.0’ and the practical usefulness of it as a term. For all the reasons laid out in my book I do believe that the issues raised by the Web2.0 movement – and not just of a technical nature, but reflecting the changing attitudes and behavior of users, the nature of organizations and how information is viewed in culture and society – do fundamentally challenge enough of the old order of records management to make a clear division with what has gone before both necessary and desirable.

Though at the same time we should not lose sight of the fact that for all the apparent difference implied by the 2.0 suffix, it is still attached to the term ‘Records Management’ and as such there is more that unites us than divides us.

In many respects I think Alan’s thoughts and this response demonstrate that the term Records Management2.0 is serving its intended purpose. I believe the most important role it can currently play is in raising awareness of the issues and generating debate (and hopefully solutions) about what this means for the records management profession.

My own view remains that the depth and degree of rethinking and change required does legitimise the decision to call it something other than just ‘records management’, and given that such change is a direct result of the impact of Web2.0 it seems to make sense to me to be obvious about that link.

For me, another advantage of keeping a very deliberate and obvious link between Web2.0 and Records Management2.0 is to avoid confusion about its aims. From some of the responses I have received both from some individuals and professional bodies I do sometimes worry that people think I am advocating throwing out all that has gone before and replacing it wholesale with the kinds of methods and techniques outlined in the book.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Where records management works, great. We have ISO15489 and a raft of other standards and best practice telling us all how to do it in time-honoured fashion and there is little or no place (for now at least) to be taking the kind of steps that I am advocating. Hopefully the Records Management2.0 title makes it clear that what I am talking about are solutions designed to fit very particular issue – those with their origins very firmly in the technology and movement that we know as Web2.0.