Editorial

Citation

McLeod, J. (2012), "Editorial", Records Management Journal, Vol. 22 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/rmj.2012.28122aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Records Management Journal, Volume 22, Issue 1

In December last year I attended the sixth triennial DLM Forum in Brussels1 for the first time in a long while. Despite the economic constraints a large number of delegates filled the main hall and there was sometimes “standing room only” for the parallel sessions. There was a definite buzz in the breaks as everyone networked and shared thoughts on the conference sessions. The main conference theme was Interoperability and MoReq2010 – Making intelligent information control a reality in Europe. Invited to give one of the opening presentations to set the scene for the conference was quite a challenge, particularly in the wake of two excellent keynote speakers from the European Commission’s Informatics Directorate-General (DIGIT) and the Federal Agency for ICT Belgium (FEDICT). However, many of our thoughts were similar or complementary.

The context for that conference is not merely complicated but complex; aspects may even appear to be chaotic and attempting to provide comprehensive coverage would have been impossible. Instead I gave a view of the context, drawing on selected examples and the views of some colleagues beginning with a picture of today’s work and personal landscape. I felt I needed to unpick the conference sub-theme but found few explanations or examples of “intelligent information control” in the published literature, at least none that used that phrase. So I conducted a very “quick and dirty” enquiry, which one could hardly call research, and asked a purposively selected group of peers, from or associated with my School at Northumbria University (the School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences), what the term meant to them, if anything, both in an organizational and a personal context. I also asked them for specific example(s) to illustrate what they wanted it to look like. The responses were varied, interesting and revealing about the user perspective on systems for information.

For one person the phrase meant nothing or very little but they assumed it was about automatic means of managing information and records management, e.g. automatic classification and metadata allocation. For another it sounded frightening because the word “control” suggested power relationships. But this colleague was comforted, so to speak, by the fact that poor systems interoperability is beneficial to our privacy! This highlights the importance of privacy and the balance between the “one-stop-shop” or “seamless integration” of multiple systems, and appropriate, assured access control. Alongside interoperability, access and security are “wicked” problems.

Personally I would like intelligent information control to mean that I didn’t have to provide my personal information to multifarious government and other agencies, that I didn’t receive multiple letters from the same or different tax offices about tax allowance etc. and hence save the taxpayer’s money – my money – whilst simultaneously being assured of data privacy and only legitimate data sharing for appropriate and beneficial purposes. For one of my colleagues it means being able to access the information they need in a format that suits them whenever and wherever they need it but they didn’t think we were even close to providing this yet. The seamless movement of information between systems and the provision of information to user in ways that meet their needs – the “intelligent” part – need further investigation and development. But in an organisational context will the level of complexity caused by cultural, political, legal, technological and other differences, mean this is the utopian dream that cannot be realised? Another colleague felt this way.

Will resources in the current economic climate stall the realisation of intelligent information control or redefine it for some organisations? For one person I spoke with such control now means achieving the minimum necessary information outcomes – compliance, data quality, retrieval – at the right price. This is a change of view or organizational culture where “average” rather than excellent is either sufficient or perhaps a necessity. Fit-for-purpose does not always mean perfection; it means a proportionate, risk assessed approach to information management, systems and technology investment, using innovative approaches and challenging the way we do things.

Reflecting on the views gathered from my “quick and dirty” survey, what strikes me is the different expectations, the fears or concerns and the enormity of the challenge. Intelligent information control is at worst meaningless or frightening. At best it enables people to get information they need in the way(s) they want it, and it enables organisations to manage their information to meet requirements at the right price and in a proportionate way. Achieving it may be the utopian dream because of the degree of complexity but people like such challenges. In the words of Captain Eugene Cernan the last man to walk on the moon “inspire them to dream the impossible and the impossible will happen”2. And, looking at the main theme of the DLM conference – interoperability and MoReq2010 – perhaps they provide the key.

Turning to this issue of the journal our articles are not specifically about making intelligent information control a reality but they all address aspects that need to be addressed and the authors are from four different continents – a truly international issue.

Dr Fiorella Foscarini, a member of the RMJ’s Editorial Advisory Board and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto examines the organizational culture perspective of business functions in the context of managing records. As she highlights the functional approach to managing records, be it to identify what records to capture, how to classify them or how to appraise and select them, has gained much support since Terry Cook’s ground breaking “what is past is prologue” article in the late 1990s. But do we really understand what we mean my function, activity and business process Foscarini asks. Drawing on her own doctoral research as well as other research she explores the notion of function and offers alternative ways to understand and represent the context in which records are created and used that are more sensitive to the cultural realities of organizations.

Nils Troselius and Anneli Sundqvist, Mid-Sweden University, also share the findings of research into the development and use of metadata schemes by two Swedish government agencies. They discovered that whilst both agencies had similar reasons for developing their metadata schemes (consistent records description, better information retrieval access by external users) they chose different approaches and based their schemes on different models. This empirical research is valuable since there is little of its kind in the public domain and should be of value to both the research and practitioner communities.

Moving from Europe to Africa Shadrack Katuu, Archives/Records Officer at the International Monetary Fund and Doctoral student at the University of South Africa, examines enterprise content management (ECM) in South Africa. Starting with an analysis of the ECM concept, he reviews literature from South Africa and then shares the results of a survey of ten organisations in the country. The survey revealed that a majority use ECM applications from one company and that the most common ECM applications modules installed are records management, document management and imaging. The data provides a baseline for future studies and research he plans to conduct.

2011 saw the publication of MoReq2010 which represents a paradigm shift in relation to its predecessors and whose vision is hugely ambitious. 2011 also marked a decade since the publication of ISO 15489, which was a significant milestone in the development of the information and records management discipline. Dr Pauline Joseph, Curtin University, and Professors Shelda Debowski and Peter Goldschmidt, both from the University of Western Australia, offer their views on the standard’s fitness-for-purpose in the context of three paradigm shifts. These are changes in technology, user expectations and transparency/compliance/accountability requirements, all of which are having an impact on the management of organisational records. They argue that whilst the principles in ISO 15489 Part 1 “remain pertinent as signposts to good practice” some of the guidelines in Part 2 need to be reconsidered in the light of these paradigm shifts. They focus particularly on classification, retention, metadata and information security which they highlight as being strongly challenged by the post Web 2.0 and EDRMS environment. Standards in our discipline are often developed by the concerted effort of relatively small groups of individuals who give their time freely and fund themselves to attend working meetings if they are not lucky enough to be funded by their organizations. If we need to develop existing or new standards that benefit organizations through better information and records management then we need more people to help to the work.

This issue includes no fewer than five resource reviews including, for the first time, a game about information governance and a book edited by Professor Terry Cook which may become a landmark publication. The number of traditional books being published that are relevant to the Journal’s readers seems to have been on the increase rather than decrease – who said the book was dead?

Julie McLeod

Notes

1. DLM Forum 12-14 December 2011, Brussels, Papers, available at: www.dlmforum.eu/index.php?option=comjotloader&view=categories&cid=44d4a36895fa5c084447161f73dd8f43f8&Itemid=142&lang=en

2. Captain Eugene Cernan speaking on Stargazing Live, BBC TV Series 2 Episode 1, 16 January 2012. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00mlr24 (download no longer available 25 January 2012).