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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.

SharePoint versus EDRM

A delegate on one of my recent EDRM training courses told me that his organisation (a large financial institution) had been planning their EDRM implementation for years and were just about to start their roll-out when they received some unwelcome news.  Another part of their organisation had purchased SharePoint. 'What should I do?' he asked me.

EDRM systems and SharePoint are both competing for the same space and market (and as the above example shows, sometimes competing within the same organisation). But there are marked contrasts in the strengths, weaknesses and records management model behind the two types of system.

Strengths
The strength of EDRM is the control it gives to organisations.  They can ensure that all their teams and departments store their documents and records within one organisational classification (fileplan). 

The strengh of SharePoint is the flexibility it gives to teams and workgroups:  a team can set up a team site or a project site within which they can have:

• their own document library to store their documents and records
• a calendar
• a bulletin board
• links to, and feeds from, other sites
• news and pictures etc.

Weaknesses
The achilles heal of EDRM is user acceptance.  The fact that teams are forced to store their records in an organisationaly defined structure brings with it the risk that teams and/or individuals will reject the structure and opt to store their documents elsewhere. Some EDRM implementations have been prematurely aborted due to lack of user-take up. 

The achilles heal of SharePoint is the overall coherence (or lack of it!) of the repository. Each document library inside each team site or project site is a world on its own.  There is no place to maintain an overall classification to bring together and make sense of all the records in the system.  My colleague Miles describes a typical SharePoint implementation as 'a tangled mess of websites, with document libraries popping up all over the place'

Speed of implementation
EDRM is notoriously slow to implement:  not just the time to configure and integrate the software, but the time taken to build the organisation's fileplan, and the time taken for the phased roll out to reach all parts of the organisation. 

SharePoint is not necessarily any easier than EDRM to configure, but once you have got it up and running teams can set up project sites and get working straight away.  Another colleague (John) describes project sites 'spreading like bindweed' as team after team sets them up.

Records management model
EDRM stems from a well worked through records management model, based on the International Records Management Standard and the statements of functional requirements issued by the National Archives (TNA 2002) and the European Union (MoReq).  Retention rules and access rules are linked to fileplan headings and passed down to the folders and records saved under those headings.

SharePoint has not attempted to meet the TNA 2002 or MoReq requirements (the strength of Microsoft's position in the market means it can prosper without them).  Instead SharePoint has its own records management model.  Rules can be defined whereby documents needed as records can be copied from document libraries in team sites, and sent to another type of site, called a records centre.  Retention rules can be applied to those documents copied to the records centre. 

I am sceptical about the value of the records centre in SharePoint.  It is an afterthought, a place where no-one visits and no work is done. A records graveyard rather than a trusted, referenced and used archive. 

Conclusions
I am no fan of the records management model behind SharePoint, but I must admit that the project site is a much more lively and interesting environment to work in than either the traditional hard copy file, or the electronic record folder in an EDRM.  My hopes are that we as a profession can:

• find ways of helping our organisations to structure and make sense of these team and project sites, rather than relying on the SharePoint's unproven Records Centre concept. 
• find ways of influencing Microsoft to improve the functionality of SharePoint in ways that make the above task easier.

SharePoint Summit

On April 1, 2008 TFPL are hosting a one-day conference in London at which practioners and consultants from a variety of UK organisations and sectors will share their experiences in using SharePoint for records management and collaborative working:  to see the programme and for details of how to sign up follow this link

Cities of the future and records of the past

This lunchtime I went to see an interactive exhibition entitled 'the city of the future'  by Patrick Kieller.

When I got there I was confronted by five big screens, each showing black and white films from the BFI archive, each film shot in a city (London, Liverpool, Dublin etc) between 1895 and 1905.

Kieller's reasoning for this was that the best way to appreciate how different the future might be is to look at the past and gauge how different that was.

I use a similar logic when working out retention schedules for records.  Outside of some highly regulated functions (banking, accounting, health and safety etc.)  UK legislation has little or nothing to say about how long records should be kept.  Instead of asking people to look into the  unknown future I ask them to think back to the remembered past.  I ask them whether it would matter if they had no records of that particular type of work from 5 years ago.  Who would it matter to and why?  And would it bother those people if we didn't have those records from 10 years previously?

I saw the same types of people trudging across Blackfriars bridge on the 1895 film as I did when I walked back across it on my return to work.  On the film people were walking across the bridge in strange clothes, and it was odd watching the horse drawn vehicles, some with really slow lethargic nags and others with sprightly high stepping horses.    On the way back to work some of the people on the bridge were pressing funny little metal things to their ears whilst talking.

Information Management in 2008

As 2008 begins, TFPL consultants reflect on the projects we have worked on over the past 12 months and outline the key information challenges that our clients have asked us to address as a pointer to the trends for the coming year.

Content management
Our consultants were involved in several intranet redesign projects as well as taxonomy strategy and development projects. The common theme was intelligent information architecture,  making content better organised and described to bring it and users together in a more natural and efficient way – to the benefit of the business AND the user.

Intranets are key resources for organisations, and TFPL helped a number of national organisations review and redesign theirs to work both as a communications channel for the business and as an efficient business application, serving up everyday information.  This process needs skills to look at both the user-focused (i.e. the layout of pages) and the content-focused,( i.e. the metadata profiles and attendant controlled vocabularies) elements.

Taxonomies continue to be important:  there effective design allowing users to manage and navigate content systems and aids retrieval using search engines.  Extending these classification aspects with resource discovery and dynamic publishing of content we are beginning to allow Information Discovery with content related to other similar content through well created and managed metadata.

Aligned to information architecture work has been a growing need from organisations to manage the complex task of migrating unstructured web content from disparate sites into centrally managed content management systems.   We have managed content migrations for a large government deparment and a global law firm.  TFPL have developed a methodology to assist our clients through a content migration, covering:

1. content audit
2. migration planning
3. user review
4. automatic, rule-based migration
5. quality assurance

Knowledge management
There has been much interest this year in the development of information and knowledge strategies to support the business objectives resulting from changing trends in external economic, social and technical advances. These drivers have led to:

• Downsizing the workforce and workspace
• Flexible work patterns, with more and more staff working from home
• New technology (web 2.0) and more robust communication networks to improve knowledge sharing and learning across organisations

We have conducted information and knowledge audits and strategy development projects for government agencies, local councils, and the not-for-profit sector.  Organisations are reviewing how they manage and deliver information to ensure that K&IM strategies and services are aligned with business objectives.  They are looking to rationalise the procurement of published material and working to deliver internal information effectively as well as seeking to avoid silo working

Our consultants spend time talking to staff across the organisation, using a variety of methods to better understand:

• What information they require to carry out their jobs
• How they want to work
• How best they would prefer to access and use information 
• What where the key issues and barriers preventing them from doing so.

In nearly all of our client organisations we found that people were spending too much time trying to find the information ‘they knew was there somewhere’. . Clients were also interested in how other organisations have addressed these issues so that good practice methodology can be adopted straight away.

The range of our IM/KM work across all the sectors has enabled TFPL to share experience and know-how with our clients and to work with them to build a vision for information and knowledge management.. In many cases TFPL has gone on to support clients through the implementation and evaluation of the projects.

Information service reviews
We have worked with in-house information services to ensure that the services and products offered are fresh and relevant.  Challenges facing information services include:

• Detachment from target audiences
• Remoteness from senior management
• Hesitation over service development
• Subjective spending decisions

Records management

The demand for records management consultancy during 2007 remained very strong across the government sector and clearly re-emerged in the private sector as organisations realign their information and records management programmes to meet changing external demands and set out to realise the benefits of technologies. Building good RM practices into the electronic records management arena still poses a challenge for many and TFPL is supporting a number of EDRM designs and implementations.

Small to medium sized organisations are attracted by the Microsoft Sharepoint offering which is considered an attractive alternative to traditional RM applications and are showing increased interest in using collaborative and social media tools.

Bringing sense to the e-records environment still requires the understanding of the connectivity between the governance frameworks, information architecture, user friendly corporate fileplans with appropriate metadata frameworks and controlled vocabularies. TFPL is meeting the growing demand for making sense of and integrating legacy records into the new e-environment through migration and rationalisation of applications that hold records.  Developing and applying retention schedules for legal and regulatory compliance across all organisations has also featured in this year's consultancy projects.

2008 is widely expected to see a tightening of belts across all sectors.  In this climate, efficiency in business is essential and good decisions can only be taken with the right information at hand.  TFPL consultants can help your business put it's Information Management strategies and practices in order.

How web 2.0 tools can help with records management

Web 2.0 tools (Blogs, wikis, tagging, RSS feeds and social networking sites) have added a human dimension to the unimaginably vast expanse of the world wide web.  They mitigate the problem of information overload on the web through allowing us to use other people to filter content of interest to ourselves.

Web 2.0 tools will not help with two of the core tasks of records management: applying retention periods and access permissions to records.  The world wide web doesn’t have those problems so hasn’t evolved tools to deal with them.

But the philosophies that lie behind these tools will influence conversations in organisations, and the expectations of colleagues.

The tools will also have practical uses in records management.

• Wikis keep a record of their own development.  The final output and the process of its creation are combined in one entity.  This makes it far simpler to manage than the many separate revisions of a particular document, where organisations have the difficult task of distinguishing which of those revisions are needed as a record and which aren't.
• An exchange of comments against a blog post is more visible and manageable than an e-mail thread, which resides only in individual's in-boxes.
• Folksonomies allow colleagues to voluntarily ‘tag’ documents (or folders) with any words they find meaningful.  Colleagues can then search using each other’s tags.  This could complement a business classification by offering many different perspectives on records, and by indicating which documents and folders particular colleagues found useful
• Social network sites have parallels with collaborative sites within organisations, and can be used to provide an alternative to e-mail, particularly to internal e-mail.

Fileplans work - IF they are understood!

TFPL is exhibiting, and James Lappin is speaking at, the RMS Conference in Brighton.  James will be talking about making fileplans work.  He will be sharing his five key 'rules of thumb' which are briefly summarised below:

• Tell a story - the top two levels of your fileplan should clearly answer the question 'what does the organisation exist to do?'
• Use a consistent logic - familiarity with the spaces where their own records belong will help people navigate the rest of the scheme
• Establish success criteria for each set of terms - your top two levels answer 'what does the organisation exist to do'.  The next levels should answer the question 'what does this function involve?'
• Help people learn - involve people in building the parts of the classification that apply to them
• Manage competing perspectives - facilitate a sample of the organisation to build a scheme that works for the group - you may need to review it and test it again.

For more information contact James at James.Lappin@tfpl.com.

Is it possible to manage e-mail?

At the September meeting of the London Group of the Records Management Society,  I used Open Space Technology to facilitate a meeting set up to adress the following question:

• is e-mail a problem for our organisations? if so what are the solutions?

Open space technology (OST) is a method of conducting events that enables those attending the event to set the agenda at the start of the meeting. Own Harrison was moved to develop OST as a result of his experiences at conferences.  He would invariably find the coffee breaks more useful than the conference sessions.  He concluded that this was because at a coffee break you talk about the issues that matter to you, ask the questions that interest you, and if you find yourself in a conversation where you are neither contributing or learning anything, you politely melt away, and start, or join, a different conversation.

A key aspect of OST is that anyone who cares about an issue can get it onto the agenda for discussion, just so long as they care about it enough to announce it to the group and to take responsibility for making sure the discussion happens.  Those people who haven't proposed an issue can join any discussion they like and can leave a group and move to another discussion whenever they like.

We met at the City Marketing Suite, in the Guildhall. It was an evening meeting, kicking off at 6:30pm  after sandwiches and coffee.   We had a nice large room, which had on one side a set of sliding doors leading to the remains of a Roman ampitheatre, and on the other a reception room with a huge, interactive scale model of the buildings of the City of London.

I set up the main room as a large circle, for the expected 30 people.  In the centre of the circle was some chubby markers, and some big blank pieces of paper (sheets of flipchart paper torn in half). 

At the start of the meeting I invited anyone who had an issue related to the management of e-mails that they wanted to explore, to come into the centre of the circle, write the issue down on one of the big pieces of paper, and then stand up and announce it to the group.

There was an uncomfortable but expectant silence for about a minute (it felt like longer!).  Eventually someone stood up (thank you Fiona).  We had our first issue:

• Can we expect users to classify e-mails so that they can be managed according to records management theory?

Some other issues followed in a steady stream:

• Is it the people who use e-mail that are the problem?
• If saving e-mails to a records folder is a long winded process, then should we still tell users to do it?'
• Are e-mails corporate records?
• If even deleted e-mails are discoverable under Freedom of Information, then are all e-mails records?

Silence.  That seemed to be it.  No hold on, there is one more:

• Should we be encouraging our colleagues to use alternative methods of communication other than e-mail?

Those who raised the issues stood holding their half sheet of paper.  Everyone else chose which issue interested them most, and the groups that formed moved off to begin their discussions.

I sat outside the discussions for a while. Owen Harrison saw the role of the facilitaor in Open Space Technology as simply being to explain the principles, get the ball rolling and then keep out the way.  You may have a vague use in picking up rubbish, and answering housekeeping questions about the location of toilets, water coolers etc..

So there I sat.  No-one seemed to need anything.  On my left hand was the 'long winded process ' discussion, debating the best way of getting an e-mail from an in-box to a records folder on a shared drive (they concluded that the 'save as' option was better than 'drag and drop' because with drag and drop you might inadvertently drop the e-mail into the wrong folder).  On my other side I could hear the 'alternative methods of communication' discussion talking about the over use of e-mail, and how people have forgotten how to pick up a phone.

I couldn't maintain my aloofness any longer.  I took a wander into the next room, most of which was taken up with the architectural model.  A large discussion had formed from the merger of ' are any e-mails records?'  with 'are all e-mails records?'.  They were at the back of the room, squidged in betwen the wall and the model.  Most standing, some sitting on a bench jutting from the wall.

A guy from a local authority was explaining their plan to keep all e-mails for ever in an e-mail archiving system.

'But what about Data Protection?'

'We will tell users to tick a box if it contains personal information and those e-mails will be deleted after a retention period.'

The group were uneasy,but none of us could come up with a really convincing reason why this couldn't or shouldn't be done.

The discussion swelled as people drifted towards us from other groups. Next to us in the main room 'can we expect users to classify e-mails?' was getting large too. The long winded process discussion must have finished: some of those people were standing next to me now.  The 'alternative methods of communication' discussion was still going strong, a small group isolated in the corner of the main room. 

All of a sudden the 'can we expect users to classify e-mails?' discussion splits like a cloud burst. Its twenty to eight. Time to call everyone back into the big circle.

''So what has come out of this evening'' I ask when everyone is settled in their chairs.  It was like lighting touch paper.  Someone mentioned the local authority's plan to keep all e-mails for ever. A horrified colleague painted a picture of his past month spent dealing with a basement store where twenty years worth of records had been left to go mouldy.

''If we keep all our e-mails we are just building up another huge mess that someone else will have to clean up in the future.''

'' Except that it won't go mouldy''

''And you can get a search engine to go through the e-mails, but they haven't yet invented a search engine that will go round a mouldy records store.''

The gloves were well and truly off, contributions were coming thick and fast, it was 8 o'clock, the advertised finish time.  I pointed the time out to the group, it made no difference, the discussion was still going strong:

''keeping everything for ever isn't records management''

Someone puts their coat on, it emboldens me.  I thank everyone for their time, and we drift off into the pouring rain outside.

As I walked through an out-of-hours City made even more deserted than usual by the rain I thought about the evening's discussions.  We as a proffession seem to have a choice.  We know what good record keeping practice is.  In this electronic age it is even harder to get people to understand and follow that practice than it was in the paper age.  Do we persist in our endeavour to get that practice followed, or do we look for alternatives? And if we look for alternatives have we ceased to practise records management?

RMS announces dates for 2007 Annual Conference

The Records Management Society have announced that their Annual Conference for 2007 will take place between 29 April - 2 May 2007.

The 2007 event will be held at the Hilton Metropole Hotel in Brighton.

RMS members are encouraged to provide ideas for content.