EDRMS on trial at the 2008 RMS conference

by James Lappin

On the second day of this year's RMS conference 120 records managers gathered to form a jury, to consider the case against EDRMS.

The prosecution had brought the following charge:

'EDRMS has been a waste of time and money'

Steve Bailey presented the prosecution case.  Steve advises the Higher Education sector on records management (very few Universities have adopted EDRMS), and writes the blog 'RM futurewatch'

The case for the defence was presented by David Bowen.  David is a consultant with Audata Ltd who specialises in the project management of EDRMS implementations

Robert Corbett, the chair of RMS Ireland Group, was the judge, and he dressed in a long red robe to heighten the courtroom drama.  Voting cards were put on the table to allow the audience to decide one way or another.

EDRMS: the case for the prosecution
Steve went first.  He hadn't pulled any punches with his motion and he didn't pull any punches with his talk.

He defined EDRMS as those systems that comply with the National Archives statement of functional requirements for electronic records management systems.

He said that the ambition of EDRMS implementations to embrace all the records of an organisation (on one system, under one classification scheme) was fatally flawed.  Organisations are not blank sheets of paper: most have already implemented line of business systems to structure the records of the parts of the business they really care about.  The EDRMS brought in to organise the rest.  Steve memorably described EDRMS as 

'a damned expensive sledgehammer to crack the nut that is the largely ephemeral contents of most network drives.'

He drew a gasp from the audience when he quoted the cost of two high profile EDRMS roll outs:  the (then) Department of Trade and Industry told Steve in response to an FOI request that they had spent £50 million on their EDRM since 2001.  The Scottish Government spent £15 million on their EDRMS.

Steve argued that EDRMS places too higher burden on users. 

'EDRMS are records management systems, designed for the convenience and benefit of the records manager - often to the severe detriment of the staff who are forced to use it. The EDRMS imposes unfamiliar and counter-intuitive new structures on the user and adds extra, bureaucratic steps to each process'

You can read Steve's blog post about the event here with a link to his full statement.

EDRMS the case for the defence
David Bowen gave a robust defence.  He argued that modern organisations need the strucuture and governance around their records that EDRMS provides.  Rather than the profession being let down by EDRMS, EDRMS has been let down by the profession. Most failed implementations could be ascribed to under-resourced or badly carried out project implementations rather than to problems with either the EDRMS model or the technology.

The verdict of the Jury
Not guilty!  The jury voted against the motion and EDRMS was acquitted.  But it was close!  I'll tell you which way I voted, and why in my next post.