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?