Update from the ARMA 2008 Conference

In comparison to last year, the ARMA Conference this year was full of energy (www.arma.org/conference/2008/index.cfm). I suppose Las Vegas being the venue had something to do with it – not that there was anything wrong with last year’s venue (Baltimore). It is that there aren’t many cities on the planet that can compete with the energy and allure of Las Vegas ...

Having said that, I think there was more to the heightened energy level in this year’s conference than the venue location… There was something else, a sense of anticipation that Records Management is finally ready for prime time, a sense that the current financial crisis is bound to lead to a wave of new regulatory controls which in turn will result in a sharp increase in demand for Records Management solutions. The argument goes as follows: if Enron gave us the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, then the “events” of October 2008 are bound to give us a lot more regulations and laws, which are surely going to incorporate new and stricter requirements for the capture, archival, retention, access controls, discovery, audits and disposition of content and records.

At the conference I participated in several discussions (some quite lively over dinner) with some of the leaders of the Records Management industry, discussions about whether Information Governance should become the new mantra of Records Management. A couple of vendors at this year’s conference were focused on this message, including RSD. The expectation is that there will be many more at ARMA 2009 in Orlando. It makes sense.

So what is this Information Governance thing?

Essentially, it is a solution framework intended to address an emerging challenge of extraordinary proportion:

1. The explosive growth in the creation and collection of content and records

2. The increasing demand for the compliance of this content with regulations, laws and internal policies

Information Governance enables organizations to apply corporate controls on content during the conduct of business. It includes solutions like Records Management, Electronic Discovery, Privacy Protection, Log Management, and many others.

RSD’s entry into the Information Governance space and its première participation in the ARMA conference could not have been more timely. Here is an ECM vendor with a 34 year history in the area of high-volume electronic record archiving and a plethora of corporate customers who have been using this technology for decades. Yet this company is largely unknown to the Records Management community and its decision makers. So one would think that RSD’s introduction of the RSD GLASS © Information Governance solution framework at that conference would go unnoticed. Not so.

At the show, RSD presented RSD GLASS ©. This is a modular and SOA-based Information Governance solution framework designed to provide governance controls over corporate records and weave them directly within the fabric of the infrastructure. The solution takes the concept of federated Records Management to the next (and ultimate) level: a complete separation between the record repositories (the tools) and the records retention policies and processes (the rules). Today, the majority of current Records Management solutions that support federated configurations are products that have been designed before the federated “era” but were later adapted to support federated functionality. These product adaptations are of course a step in the right direction, but customers interested in implementing Information Governance solutions at the enterprise level are starting to ask for solutions that are much more modular in design and more service orientated. It makes sense. RSD GLASS is precisely designed to meet this emerging requirement.

We are living in exciting times.

Bassam ZARKOUT
Technical Advisory Committee Member