The View from the MER 2009 Conference in Chicago

On May 18-20 I attended the Managing Electronic Records (MER) Conference in Chicago (www.cohasset.com). This conference is a yearly ritual where Records Management (RM) professionals (and old friends) meet and try to make sense of the RM industry and where it is going.

There was something different this year… something very interesting. There was a sense that RM as a discipline is moving slowly but surely under the umbrella of “Information Governance” (IG), an emerging space that includes Electronic Discovery, Data Privacy, Audit Trail Management, Storage ILM, Digital Rights Lifecycle, etc.

The RM “mission” seems to be changing in at least two fundamental ways:

1) Organizations want to manage all facets of records lifecycle and not simply their retention and disposition aspects:

·         Record metadata may have different lifecycle from records themselves (a requirement in DoD 5015.2 and MoReq2)

·         PKI keys that control the access to records outside the organization boundaries must have lifecycle and that lifecycle must be related to the lifecycle of the record itself

·         Lifecycle rules in the Storage ILM layer can no longer be disconnected for the lifecycle of the record as defined in the Records Retention Schedule

·         Most Privacy Laws mandate maximum retention rules (can be event based – you must destroy this record when this event occurs), and/or the anonymization of records at some point in their lifecycle.

More and more, the RM profession is being challenged in its claim that its ownership of the management of records lifecycle. In the “Information Governance” game, RM is an important team player (key I might add), but not the only one.

2) The same corporate policies must apply to all forms and formats of records and not simply to the records that are discreet artifacts (electronic documents and physical documents) – see examples below:

·         Archived high-volume reports (customer statements, phone bills, etc.)

·         Content in database applications (CAD data, GIS data, financial records, etc.)

·         Content in data warehouses

Bottom-line: It is very hard to justify an enterprise RM solution if all it does is to handle a subset of the records and only one aspect of their lifecycle.

   

Two sessions at the MER Conference highlighted the importance of the points above:

The first was a presentation by Dr. Ken Thibodeau, the Director of the ERA Project at the US National Archives (www.archives.gov/era).

Dr. Thibodeau spoke directly about the “(i) open-ended proliferation of new forms of creating, capturing, and combining information, (ii) the more diverse ways of applying technology in the conduct of business, and (iii) the expanding capacity to re-use and re-purpose data”. He also stated that “Records Managers must (i) deal comprehensively with the permeation of digital information, (ii) acknowledge that established RM knowledge and methods have limited applicability in cyberspace, and (iii) recognize the opportunities that digital technology brings to the table”. He went on to describe how the RMS (Records Management Services) component specifications will re-shape the future of RM (www.archives.gov/era/rms).

The second presentation was by Julie Gable, President of Gable Consulting (www.gableconsulting.com) and a known speaker in the RM space.

Ms. Gable spoke about the management of metadata as being “the new frontier of RM”. She cited legal cases and standards (Sedona, ISO 23081-1, MoReq2) that highlight the importance of metadata in the management of the lifecycle of records.

She went on to describe the enterprise RM model as a federated solution that has at its heart a “Central Catalog”, a normalized master repository of all record metadata within the enterprise. She concluded her presentation by describing RSD GLASS (our own Information Governance solution framework) as a prime example of this new wave of solutions.

I believe that the RM industry has reached a point where it must revisit many of its assumptions… and evolve the “solution” to accommodate the evolving needs of the “Information Governance” mission.

“Information Governance” is a team sport (a lot more than RM ever was)… and the positions on the “team” must be earned! Professionals from IT, Data Privacy and Storage ILM are already positioning themselves to be active players in this game. The RM profession must rise to that challenge and go beyond the internal debates about the minutia of classifications and record series and the reasons why it (the RM profession) does always not get enough corporate recognition (and budgets).

A final anecdotal note: A very senior person in the industry who attended the sessions of Dr. Thibodeau’s and Ms. Gable commented to me that the RSD GLASS solution framework was well aligned with the US Federal Government RMS specifications. I told him that this was not a coincidence but rather an alignment by design… RSD GLASS is designed to address the ‘Information Governance” challenge from all its facets.