tfpl blog

The difference between networking and not working is more than just one letter

By Ian Wooler

A common theme that crops up in discussions with clients as part of assignments, or with delegates in workshops and training sessions, is the difference some employees experience between work and home life – not in terms of ‘balance’, but in terms of being ‘connected’ or ‘disconnected’. Let me give you an example: the employee who spends some of his/her home life connected to friends, associates, on-line networks and things of interest; and all via the speed of light (broadband?), feels ‘disconnected’ when they are in the work place where their view of organisational systems is that they are “clunky”, search is difficult, and access to social media restricted.

Whilst this view may not be an accurate reflection of the organisational truth; perception for many is reality. Others comment that they need to be able to network and collaborate quickly and easily with work colleagues to complete ever demanding and complex business tasks, but are restricted from so doing by “the system”. To support their point they go on to quote a success story from the use of social networking. A current example given is that of ‘boy band’ Blake. They met (there are four of them) and then found their manager on Facebook and have just signed a £1m, 5 album deal with Universal! Of course, there are many pros and cons to consider before an organisation makes the decision whether to embrace and implement a new (or their version of new) technology, or give employees access to one in ‘open-space’ – but in the meantime, the ‘connected’ and ‘disconnected’ discussions continue. Looked at another way, these discussions provide a great opportunity for knowledge and information management professionals to facilitate, negotiate, and harness the positive energy around this debate for the benefit of their organisations and fellow employees.

Debates on SharePoint at the 2008 RMS conference

I was one of the facilitators at a collaborative session at the 2008 Records Management Society looking at the future of electronic records management.

I asked the group the following question:

which will be more influential by the year 2012:  SharePoint or EDRMS (Electronic Document and Records Management Systems)?

A minority thought that EDRMS would be more influential because SharePoint does not have full records management functionality.  The majority thought that SharePoint would be more influential.  They thought organisations would implement it regardless of the relative weakness of its records management functionality, because of:

• Microsoft's entrenched relationships with IT departments in most organisations
• Microsoft's willingness to incentivise organisations to take it up by bundling SharePoint up with other products and upgrades
• The fact that SharePoint can do many more things than just manage records and hence will appeal to different interests within the organisation:  even if a records manager rejects SharePoint it may be advocated and procured by their Head of Communications, or a Knowledge Manager or an intranet manager.

Records managers would face two challenges with SharePoint:

• the first challenge would be as a profession, to influence Microsoft to add records management functionality. 
• The second would be to get their own organisations to take seriously the issues of governance and records management within SharePoint implementations.  The group thought this was the stiffer of the two challenges because many SharePoint implementations will be driven from a non-records management agenda. In contrast Steve Bailey thought that the interest other information professionals showed in SharePoint was an advantage to records managers when compared with EDRM which sometimes failed to engage the interest of non-records managers.

There was a debate about the future of EDRM suppliers.  Some felt that their market would be squeezed because many organisations would think that SharePoint, despite its records management weaknesses, did enough for them to get buy without EDRMS.  Others thought that there was a role for EDRMS either plugged into SharePoint, or instead of SharePoint, for orgniasations who wanted stricter RM disciplines than SharePoint supports.  Tony Hendley of Cimtech said that he thought that EDRM suppliers had always had to adapt themselves to the general desktop environments and would evolve products that fitted the SharePoint environment.

On the following day Roger Smethurst presented on DEFRA's implementation of, and customisation of, SharePoint (I've blogged on a similar presentation by Roger here). Roger said Microsoft had shown great interest in the customisations that DEFRA had made to SharePoint for records management purposes.  He had gone over to Seattle at Microsoft's invitation and they had discussed the possibility of incorporating some of them into future releases.

Roger Smethurst said that he was broadly happy with his SharePoint implementation.  The biggest frustration he had was the lack of integration between Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint.  There is no simple direct way for a colleague to save an e-mail into SharePoint.  Roger ascribes this to the way Microsoft is set up as an organisation. The division of Microsoft responsible for developing Outlook has its own strategy and roadmap, that sits completely seperately from the development of the rest of the Microsoft product range. 

Trends and priorities in legal KM…

…was the topic of conversation at the first TFPL Connect Law Special Interest Group meeting last week.  Special Interest Groups run alongside the main TFPL Connect programme and offer members interested in a particular topic or sector an opportunity to discuss matters of interest and network with colleagues.  Attendees discussed current trends and issues in legal KM and agreed the agenda for the remaining three meetings for the year.  Next up on 2nd July the group will tackle the topic of ‘the dream know how system’.

Interested in becoming a member? Please click here to apply for TFPL Connect membership online.

An Insider's view of the Information Tribunal

The Information Tribunal is the final point of appeal against decisions made by the Information Commissioner on the following types of cases:

• Freedom of Information (FOI)
• Environmental Information Regulations (EIR)
• Data Protection
• Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations.

Decisions made by the Information Tribunal can be appealed to the High Court, but only on a point of law.

Paul Taylor is a lay member of the Information tribunal.  He also has a full time post as Information Policy Manager for Education Leeds.  Last night I heard him give a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of the Information Tribunal in his talk to the Records Management Society's London Group.

The tribunal hears around 130 cases per year. The vast majority of these are FOI and EIR cases.  Currently it is hearing cases arising from FOI/EIR requests made in late 2005.  The main reason for the backlog is that the Office the Information Commissioner's Office in Wilmslow has insufficient staffing to promptly process the vast volume of appeals against rejected FOI requests.  Some requestors give up their appeal in frustration at the length of time it takes to process the appeal.

The Information Tribunal has a sectretariat (based in Leicester) that arranges services for each hearing.  The tribunals themselves are drawn from a pool of chairs (who are legally qualified) and lay members (practioners who have experience of working with information rights law).  Each tribunal consists of three people:  a chair and two lay members.

At most hearings the person who made the original FOI/EIR request represents themselves.  In contrast both the Information Commissioner (against whose decision the appeal is being brought) and the public authority that is the subject of the request, are represented by experienced Counsel.  Paul felt that despite the imbalance in experience between the requestor and the counsels representing the other parties, requestors often acquitted themselves suprisingly well in front of the tribunal. 

The tribunal is relatively formal in its proceedings.  The room is set out like a courtroom, the three person tribunal sits on a raised platform, and the court is asked to rise when the tribunal members walk into the court.  There is a concern that this formality may be off-putting to requestors representing themselves, and the Tribunal is looking at ways of ensuring it's procedings are as requestor friendly as possible.

Procedings are open to the public to attend.  Occasionally parts of the hearing have to be heard behind closed doors (or example when the public authority is questioned on the actual information that has been requested and that they think is exempt from release under FOI).

The Tribunal has some strong powers: it can ask the Information Commissioner to assess the records management practice of an organisation if it appears that poor records management has affected its ability to meet its Freedom of Information obligations.

Lay membership of the Information Tribunal is a significant time commitment (the time necessary to read all the papers, attend the hearing and input into the decisions). The work is renumerated and expenses are paid.  Most lay members find time from the holiday/flexitime entitlements of their full time jobs.  Once you are appointed a lay member your tenure lasts until the age of 70.

Paul loves being a lay member of the Information tribunal and would recommend any FOI practioner to apply should the Information Tribunal advertise any lay member vacancies.  Being a lay member had broadened his horizons, allowed him to work on high profile cases such as the Iraq Weapons of Mass destruction Case and to contribute to setting precedents in Freedom of Information Case Law.

RMS Conference 2008: the spectres haunting records management

Steve Bailey opened the 2008 Records Management Society Conference by conjuring  up three spectres to strike  fear into the hearts of the assembled records management professionals

1. The spectre of the next generation of young people to hit the workplace, steeped in web 2; weaned on Facebook,Bebo, myspace; used to tagging their photos and videos and Flickr and You tube .  Steve's prediction:  they won't adopt the classification structures, metadata rules and retention schedules that form the traditional records management toolkit.
2. The spectre of free software provided and hosted via the web.   Software like Google apps, which allows individuals and/or teams to opt out of using their organisation's records systems by providing a ready made alternative for creating,  sharing and storing documents.  Steve's predictions:  the era of forcing people to use the systems we want them to use are over.  If organisations block the next generation's access to the sites that they spend half their life on, they will walk to other workplaces.
3. The spectre of cloud computing:  companies like Amazon and Google offering organisations near unlimited server space, and hosting their e-mail accounts and information systems via the web.  Steve's prediction:   there will be no incentive for organisations to apply retention schedules when they don't bear the cost of purchasing and maintaining their servers

Steve gave a call to arms to the profession:  keep the timeless objectives and goals of records management, but ditch the tools and methods you currently use, tools forged in a different era, the hard copy era.   He charactised methods such as retention schedules and distinctions between records and documents as being too time consuming to scale up to the  exploding volumes of information unleashed by the onset of the world wide web, e-mail and office networks.

Steve advocated that the profession should try to harness to records management methods that have been used succesfully on the web; methods that we know are acceptable to the web2 generation and can cope with huge volumes of information.  One such idea was to allow users of documents and records to tag them and/or rate them:  this would

• help the individual user to get back in future to that document,
• provides a route for others to find and better understand the document/record
• add to the knowledge that the organisation has of its own information, how it is used, and its relative importance

Steve did not pretend that his ideas on how to harness web 2 are fully thought through solutions: at this stage he is proposing it as a field for further discussion and investigation. This is still blue skies thinking and it isn't easy at this point in time for any records manager to integrate these insights into their daily practice. 

Steve's talk was well received:  he is a forthright, entertaining but thoughtful and reasoned speaker, and his blog RM futurewatch is the best and most widely read blog in the records management world.  But at this point in time most records managers are reporting that their organisations do not want their staff to use Google apps/Google docs; do not want to outsource their servers, and are happy to block access to sites such as facebook if they are overused. 

The big question is will organisations be able to hold to this line as time moves on?  What if applications like Facebook/Google docs start to take root as environments in which people from different organisations can co-operate and share knowledge with each other?  Will organisations find that they are missing out on so much information and communication that they suffer more from blocking access than they would from living with the consequences of their staff using them?