Records Mgmt & Archiving

The last post of Chris Walker is worth reading (Canadian IM & IG consultant who attended our foundational meeting at the cradle of the Swiss chapter of ARMA in 2011).

https://phigsimc.com/2016/05/24/two-continents-two-information-governance-conferences-one-conclusion/

"Very soon, if you’re only (don’t take this the wrong way) a records manager or archivist your career will be over. The titles may stay the same, but the skill sets and thought processes must evolve. All information, regardless of medium or storage location, must be in scope. "

Professional profiles and skills are constantly moving and blurring suffering from numbers of disruptions.

There are many reasons why we need Information Governance (see Ten reasons from Barclay Blair) .
https://barclaytblair.com/2010/03/22/10-reasons-information-governance-makes-sense/
“Content as a service” is just one aspect to harness business information for better decision making. Possibly it's just old Business Intelligence wine in new bottles.

What's really true:
The whole IG/M space, including the associations, is having a bit of a tough time with its own transformation.
ARMA hst lost hundreds of members during the last few years and it is really difficult to get necessary awareness and support from the management. (WHO CARES?)

. .. it’s more of what and HOW should we be doing and to whom should we be doing it.
albeit ILMG (information lifecycle mgmt and governance)

What has to be avoided is to follow a path of remaining an isolated GROUP of professionals which is missing its new vision and mission. RIM is just one discipline under the holistic umbrella of IG. ... and it's mainly an organisational challenge of change not a technical one ...

so tönt es noch nicht, aber immerhin bekommt das Records Mgmt mehr Beachtung neben dem Archivarsberuf.

Die neue Broschüre des VSA ist online:
http://www.vsa-aas.org/de/beruf/beruf-archivar/

CR2PA means: Club des responsables de politiques et projets d'archivage

Le CR2PA (www.cr2pa.fr) est un club utilisateurs né en 2008 de la rencontre entre quelques directeurs de projets d’archivage pionniers partageant la même vision et la même ambition de promotion de l’archivage, au niveau managérial dans l’entreprise.

Le club regroupe env. une trentaine d'entreprises et d'organismes publics dont un grand nombre des entreprises du CAC40 .

L'archivage managérial est au centre des activités.
voir la mission du CR2PA: http://blog.cr2pa.fr/cr2pa/

Again it seems that we have the european semantic problem of the usage of professional terms in the different languages.
As archiving in the anglo-saxon world and also in German means just permanent retention, mostly for historical reasons (Sekundärzweck according to Schellenberg) there are other terms which came up as they are less compromised by corporate usage as the rather dusty notion of archives.
Digital preservation means a long-term storage under a legal decision (en) and in Germany the term "Langzeitspeicherung" has come as a german equivalent to "preservation" into the discussion and the community (see: eBook from Bearing point:
http://newsletter.bearingpoint.com/ebook/epaper-Langzeitspeicherung/index.html

Eine Arbeitsgruppe der Interessengemeinschaft Records Management hat zum Berufsbild des "GEVER-Spezialisten" einen Flyer erarbeitet.
Das KRM wird auch als Anlaufstelle genannt.

Flyer download

Interesting task list for a RIM team leader in the Ministry of Justice UK.
The salary in Switzerland would be higher but we do not have a national health
insurance ...

go to document

RM as a discipline is seeking new orthodoxies: we are at a crossroads.

One possible future orthodoxy is the “records repository model” – where a business
classification scheme is held in a back end system (above item), and applied to content held in the various
applications used by colleagues (item level).

As more and more applications come on stream in organizations individuals and
teams have increased choice as to how and where they keep their records. This
makes it problematic to insist on one corporate records system, and to apply
retention and access rules. That's the impact of the individual orange world (incl. social Media)
on the corporate blue world.

We have to live with the fact that Organizations have an information archaeology, not an information architecture (p. 254 Lappin). Digital landfill specialists ... is also a good term.
Dump and pick will be the paradigm in big organizations as transparency is not even a required principle from a legal perspective.
RM is the art of throwing things away. Therefore we have to focus on the enforcement of our disposition policy.

This is not about losing confidence in the RM profession as records are generated every day and we have no choice to keep them.
But we have to retreat from some orthodoxies (e.g. EDRMS as the only solution and centralizing paradigm which has brought us to a vendor-led profession) as James Lappin explains in his excellent article.

This refers to Lappins article in the latest issue of the Records Mgmt Journal, p.252-264
(Vol.20, Nr.3 2010): What will be the next records management orthodoxy?

I also recommend to read the
blog post
entitled "How to keep records in the 21st century?"

JH

This document may help to prepare and develop job descriptions for digital repository
posts.

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/documents/Staff_and_Skills_Set_2009.pdf


see: SHERPA Website

Eine interessante Debatte auf dem Blog von Steve Bailey:

Wann naht das Ende des klassischen Records Managers? Uebernimmt die IT alles ?

http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/2009/02/end-of-rm-as-profession-in-its-own.html

and

http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-on-end-of-records-management-as.html