Records Mgmt & Archiving

"Since SharePoint is designed to reduce the need for IT involvement and put more control in the hands of end-users, procedural controls must be established to ensure that the proliferation of sites, libraries and folders does not reach pandemic proportions.
This is managed through an effective, multi-tiered governance structure that provides guidelines and scope at each level to provide boundaries on end-user creativity. These levels often are segmented at the farm, site-collection and site tiers, with each level building details on the decisions made in the tier above."

These requirements are almost impossible to implement in a big company.
Uncontrolled sprawling of Sharepoint instances in the organization can merely be stopped
once the deployment has been started.


Wishful thinking

The complexity necessary for long-term preservation of digital records contributes to the potential for failure. Consider the vulnerable points, colloquially known as a chain of weak links:

Gordon Hoke on KM world

Removable media—There is no way to assess the longevity of removable media, including tape and laser-written disks (CD, DVD, Blu-ray, WORM, etc.). There are too many variables. The standard way of testing media is “accelerated aging,” but only the future will prove its accuracy. There are no standards for quality, and it is difficult to impossible to consistently identify the materials and manufacturing processes that produced a shipment of disks. Controlled temperature and humidity affect the stability of a disk’s substrate and dyes, but storage environment is only half a disk’s life cycle. Even for a disk made of high-quality materials, who can verify the conditions and duration under which the disk was transported and warehoused before use?

Hardware obsolescence is obvious and visible to all who have reached adulthood. Floppy disk drives (5.25-in. or 3.5-in.) are difficult to find, to say nothing of players for ZIP, Jazz and other proprietary format media. In 1991, Sony advertised a 12-in. optical disk guaranteed to last 99 years. While the verity of that claim will be revealed in 2090, not even museums are likely to have a compatible disk player.

As operating systems evolve, they have limited compatibility with their ancestors. Can a PC running Windows 7 read files created under CP/M? Can today’s IBM Power System OS consistently extract files written on a s/38 from 1979 or a system/3 from 1969?

Application software becomes obsolete as well. Consider the boneyard of former market leaders: VisiCalc, WordStar, Wang word processing and countless others. Microsoft stopped supporting Office 97 about 10 years after its release.

Output drivers—Retrieving old records also depends on being able to display and/or print content. Even with legacy CPUs, OSes and application software, the period monitors, printers and the software that drives them may be unavailable or inoperable.

Encryption and password protection—Long-lived records, including health records, often require security and privacy protection. Maintenance of passwords and decryption capabilities loom as additional impediments to the retrieval of old records.

This blog has created a general web-survey, available for download through Google Docs, which provides a means of investigating what types of digital objects or communication mechanisms are available electronically and how these objects are organized and managed.

Free for download

http://e-records.chrisprom.com/?p=1744