Digital Landfill

The #Obama Administration's RM Initiative - What Does It Mean to You?

I recently did a webinar with Sue Trombley from Iron Mountain on the impact of the Obama Administration's records management initiative -- not just on the federal government, but on records management in general.  The archived webinar is HERE.

The webinar was so much fun I thought I would follow it up with a short series of questions with Sue. Here's the interview.

JM: One of the themes that we explored on the webinar was the notion that the implications of this directive stretch beyond the federal government.  Tell me a little bit about how you see those implications and what the directive tells us about sound records management practice.

ST: I think that the Directive brings to light some of the very basic best practices that we have been espousing for RIM for years.  First is the acknowledgement that electronic records are the way we conduct the majority of our business and as a result, we must have a strategy to enable the people, process and technology required to manage information in a distributed data environment.  Next is the recognition that successful and sustained RIM programs must be led from the highest levels in the organization, hence the Senior Agency Official role that is at the assistant Secretary level.  The Directive mentions formal training, certification of Records Officers and the establishment of an occupation classification for RIM employees – all of which are sound records and information management practices for public and private organizations.

JM:  One of the themes at the core of the directive is the necessity for regular and sustaining records management training within an organization.  Tell me a little bit about the importance of training, and how well organizations have done in providing this training in the past.

ST:  Training has been hit or miss – it all depends on the organization’s culture, seriousness of attitude about RIM, and, of course, available resources.  I like the use of eLearning courses that can be taken on-line anytime regardless of the physical location of the employee.  Employees hear the exact same message and can be tested to determine if they understand the concepts as well as their role and responsibilities.  These courses can be supplemented by department-specific training by records officers, or others.  I’ve found the “lunch and learn” approach to be very successful.  Without proper training and reinforcement, there is no chance that a RIM program can achieve maximum success.  It would be great if Records Management can partner with internal Communications or HR departments to ensure on-going communication about the Program through emails, posters, website entries, or special events.

JM:  I like your concept of thinking in big buckets rather than micro buckets when it comes to setting up classification and taxonomy schemes.  At the core of our conversation was the idea of getting something right and moving on rather than biting off too much and not being able to actually implement.  Tell me about your concept of big buckets and how they ultimately play into our ability to use technology to automatically classify records.

ST: Dr. Susan Cisco spearheaded the call for big buckets a couple of years ago.  What’s interesting is that in her research some of the early adopters of big buckets were the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2003 and the U.S. Patent Office in 2004.  We know from research the fewer series or classes of records with more distinction between them are easier for humans and machines to classify records – whether that is through auto-assisted classification or auto-classification.  I like to think of “right-sizing” schedule series to create those greater distinctions while not increasing any element of risk.

JM:  The concept of designating a senior agency official or SAO with ultimate responsibility for the creation and enforcement of records management practices and procedures within an agency is a significant new departure.  Do you have any insights as to how effective the agencies have been so far in designating these SAOs?

ST: I don’t have much insight at this point.  I do know that the SAOs were supposed to be named by 11/15/12.  From what we have seen, the lists seems to be a combination of C-Level (CIO, CFO), Chiefs of Staff and records officers.

JM:  Do you see “defensible disposition” – getting rid of information that is no longer needed – as a complement to becoming more prudent and strategic with regards to what you actually keep? 

ST:  Absolutely.  If we are managing our records according to a RIM policy – that must include the entire lifecycle of the record from its creation through to its movement to an archive if deemed a permanent record or its destruction if not.  When it comes to Discovery, Courts support the destruction of data providing it is 1) not on a legal hold 2) destruction is informed by retention rules in an approved Schedule, and 3) that destruction happens in a systematic and consistent fashion – it cannot be ad hoc.  As organizations remove records no longer required for business purposes they have easier access to active records, reduce their storage costs, and reduce the cost/risk of litigation.

JM:  Do you have any thoughts about the formats in which electronic records must be retained?  I’m thinking specifically, for example, about PDF/A.  Did the directive say anything about specific electronic formats?

ST: The directive does not give any specifics about formats for permanent electronic records.  It does say that NARA will provide guidance by 12/31/13 regarding the transfer of records to NARA – including “sustainable formats commonly used to meet agency business needs.”    It would seem as though since states and other countries have adopted the PDF/A as the format of choice, that it will factor into NARA’s guidance.

JM:  if someone wants to be kept informed about the directive on an ongoing basis are there particular resources that you recommend?

ST: NARA is a primary source, including their blog, Records Express.  Webinars such as the AIIM/Iron Mountain event, Federal News Radio, and records management blogs and listservs are just a few other resource options. 

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Those interested in this topic might also find our upcoming (Feb 7) webinar on The Dark Side of Big Data - Beyond Defensible Disposition and Legacy Info Cleanup towards profitable Information Governance of Interest.

You might also be interested in our Electronic Records Management training.

 

What steps should you be taking to "future proof" your information management career?

Technology has always been fast-moving, but it seems that there is a “perfect storm” of change right now.  Cloud, mobile, social and big data are forces that create dramatic opportunities for improved business process, better employee collaboration and closer customer engagement.  Meanwhile, content overload, security, litigation and compliance create huge potential risks for most organizations.

Increasingly, these new forces revolve around unstructured content - the information that flows through systems of engagement rather than systems of transaction.  Because of these global information management trends, the career opportunities for “information professionals” have never been higher.  Leading the way in these new uncharted waters provides a real chance for a knowledgeable and qualified information practitioner to raise their value to the business.

At the same time, though, there is also a risk for skills marginalization as the premium for pure domain-specific technical skills declines and the premium for a wider set of skills tied to the needs of the business increases.

In Race Against the Machine, Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson talk about the new challenges that arise relative to skills development once the exponential pace of technology reaches the point where jobs that were traditionally exclusively the province of humans (e.g., those requiring complex pattern recognition like driving a car, or those requiring complex communication skills like translation) can be done by "machines."  They indicate that we are approaching a time in which mental labor is increasingly being done by computers.  They compare our current time to that experienced in the 1700s and 1800s when steam (ie., machines) replaced physical labor, and they use the fable of John Henry, a steel driver who beat the machine but died in the process, as a way of illustrating the need to race with rather than against the machine.

Racing with the machine in the modern era requires an understanding of the power of networks.  It requires imagination to understand how technologies can be combined to create new value.  It requires technical knowledge, but also business acumen to put that technical knowledge into context. 

About a year ago Information Week had this cover, which underscores the nature of the challenge facing information professionals.  Either speed up the game, learn new skills, and connect to the business, or face increasing marginalization. Per David Foote, an expert in IT skills development, "Gone is the tendency to hire specialists and large teams of limited range permanent staff for long-term initiatives. New models require smaller teams made up of multi-taskers and multi-dimensionally skilled workers with subject matter expertise, business savvy, technology skills, and a range of appropriate interpersonal and 'political' skills."

A new whitepaper by AIIM (get it HERE) identifies a high demand for qualified information professionals who have a combination of business experience and a broad base of general IT skills, but who also understand how to manage content and information lifecycles. According to the report “Career Development for Information Professionals,” underwritten by Oracle, there is a recognition of the changes and challenges in technology at the moment, and a strong desire to update and broaden skill sets to meet the new demands.

According to the survey, the role of information professional is seen as vital to successful exploitation of mobile, social, big data and cloud technologies, and for many has become an aspirational mid-point between a technical specialist and business generalist. Currently, there is an optimistic view across all areas for employment in information management but the biggest change is a need for more information/data analysts and information architects, followed by project managers and business analysts. Taxonomy and metadata design, information architecture, standards compliance and governance were seen as the most difficult skills to find.

These technology changes present individuals with the opportunity to increase their value to their current organization, although 37 percent of respondents are expecting to move to new jobs within the next two years. A higher salary is the most prevalent motivation to change, but 22 percent of respondents rank an opportunity to work with different technologies as more important than better promotion prospects. The most popular step to developing skills was identified as certification, with 43 percent reporting to hold two or more business or technical certifications. AIIM’s training qualification is held by 22 percent and four percent have already passed the recently introduced Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam. Respondents identified the information professional role as the most important to the future health of business, with 30 percent considering themselves information professionals.

Recruiters in the survey see ideal candidates as having an understanding of the business, as well as knowledge of the cloud, social and big data analytics. In general, certifications are acknowledged as a more up-to-date indicator of competence than college qualifications, which underscores the value of business experience.

According to my colleague Doug Miles, “There is general agreement that improved information competency results in increased productivity, better decision making and improved collaboration, but the real challenge is that IT experience is struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in business." 

Oracle's Christian Finn (Senior Director, Product Management) echoes this, “The increasing importance of analytics, big data, cloud, customer experience, mobile and social has created a need for a new kind of information professional. People who have the skills to tackle rapidly evolving business challenges through an understanding of these technologies will have a distinct advantage moving forward. Building knowledge and validating skill sets through a range of training and certifications, including the new CIP, can be a critical component of success for today’s information professionals, whether they are looking for a new job or trying to help their organization achieve its goals.”

The paper suggests there is a real opportunity for knowledgeable, qualified information professionals who can reconcile the advantages of cloud, mobile, social and big data technology with compliance and security risks. They can raise their value to the business by delivering improvements in business process, employee collaboration and customer engagement. For individuals looking to evolve into sought-after information professionals AIIM recommends:

• Stay aware of changes in the IT landscape: information professionals are valued for a combination of known skills, business understanding and ability to match new technology to business opportunities.
• Recognize that your salary and career prospects reflect current value, not past value, and take every opportunity to demonstrate new skills and champion potential business benefits of new technologies.
• Keep your skills up to date and seek information professional certification to validate your knowledge of how information competence enhances business value, limits risk and reduces process costs.

The new AIIM White Paper is available at no charge at this LINK.

 

Big Data, Operation Narwhal, Project Orca and the Election of a President

OK. We all swore on Election Day that we didn't want to hear one more word about anything to do with the Presidential election. Living in a swing state (Virgina), we were treated to an endless onslaught of horrendous negative ads from both candidates, plus at least 5-10 robo calls per day.  The calls were not lost on kids as young as first graders.  A friend of ours who teaches first grade reported that a student came in one morning, very excited, and reported, "Ms. Willis, you won't believe it. We got a personal phone call at home last night from BOTH Mitt Romney and Barack Obama."

There is a story, though, that still needs more coverage.  And that story is the role that technology played in the election.  More specifically, how social technologies, big data, text analytics, and the integration of all of the above with plain old feet on the ground impacted the election.

One thing is clear regardless of political preference, the Obama folks ("Operation Narwhal") outplayed the Romney folks ("Project Orca").  Per Jed Wylie, couple of data points to consider:

• Obama – 33 million Facebook likes and 23 million Twitter followers.
• Romney – 12 million Facebook likes and 1.7 million Twitter followers.
• Obama ran an email marketing campaign which had a list of 13 million highly targeted people on it.  He emailed 20 times more than Romney and his open rate was 10.7% as compared to Romney’s 6.4%.

But the story goes beyond this.  The full story includes the marriage of analytics, email marketing, social presence, and execution in the field via mobile technologies.  I should also say that this post is NOT intended as a political post, but as a TECHNOLOGY post. Friends that know me know that I have THE most dysfunctional and schizophrenic presidential voting history imaginable. [Hint: I voted for John Anderson in 1980.]

Last week, AIIM's Executive Leadership Council enjoyed presentations focused on Big Data, and more specifically, the intersection between execution and analytics.  These presentations (along with a previous set in Europe), will be the basis for a white paper early next year. (Click here for a copy of our white paper on consumerization of IT, C-Change: The Impact of Consumerization of IT.)

All this Big Data talk got me interested in finding more about what actually went on in the Presidential election. Here are few of the best stories I have found.  Enjoy.  If I've missed a good article, post the link in the comments and I'll add it to the original post.

The Narwhal and the Orca - O'Reilly Radar -- 11/26/12

Best line:  "If you follow technology, you don’t have to read between the lines much to realize that Narwhal embodied the best of the DevOps movement: rapid iteration, minimal barriers between developers and operations staff, heavy use of “cloud” technology, and constant testing to prove that you can handle outages and heavy load. In contrast, Romney’s Orca was a traditional corporate IT project gone bad."

When the Nerds Go Marching In -- The Atlantic -- 11/16/12

This article by Alexis Madrigal is the most detailed analysis I've seen of the Obama efforts.

Best line: "Orca was supposed to be the Republican answer to Obama's perceived tech advantage. In the days leading up to the election, the Romney campaign pushed its (not-so) secret weapon as the answer to the Democrats' vaunted ground game. The billing the Republicans gave the tool confused almost everyone inside the Obama campaign. Narwhal wasn't an app for a smartphone. It was the architecture of the company's sophisticated data operation. Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp's software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like touting the iPad as a Facebook killer, or comparing a GPS device to an engine."

ORCA, meet Narwhal. This is how it's done. | RedState -- 11/9/12

Best line: "The Democrats’ Operation Narwhal had fields offices and volunteers locally in each of the 50 states.  While many Republicans laughed at the Obama Event Registry, and “Have dinner with Michelle and Barack,” the Democrats were collecting email addresses and demographic data so that they could target people with specific emails on specific issues.  On election day, they turned out the vote. And the Republicans, we got ORCA.  Beaten and eaten by a grown-up Flipper."

Obama’s White Whale -- How the campaign’s top-secret project Narwhal could change this race, and many to come -- The Slate -- 2/15/12

Note the date on this post.  Sasha Issenberg wins my "pre-cog" (for Phillip Dick fans) award.

Best line: "This year...as part of a project code-named Narwhal, Obama’s team is working to link once completely separate repositories of information so that every fact gathered about a voter is available to every arm of the campaign. Such information-sharing would allow the person who crafts a provocative email about contraception to send it only to women with whom canvassers have personally discussed reproductive views or whom data-mining targeters have pinpointed as likely to be friendly to Obama’s views on the issue. From a technological perspective, the 2012 campaign will look to many voters much the same as 2008 did...This year’s looming innovations in campaign mechanics will be imperceptible to the electorate, and the engineers at Obama’s Chicago headquarters racing to complete Narwhal in time for the fall election season may be at work at one of the most important. If successful, Narwhal would fuse the multiple identities of the engaged citizen—the online activist, the offline voter, the donor, the volunteer—into a single, unified political profile."

The day a Narwhal killed an Orca -- 11/9/2012

This piece is by a Republican poll watcher and describes the problems experienced in the field by those trying to use Orca.

Best line:  "In theory, on Election Day we would be using using tactical nukes against Narwhal's ground troops. They would never know what hit them. In practice - as first tries of technologically complicated systems usually are - Orca was a disaster."

Everything We Know (So Far) About Obama’s Big Data Tactics -- ProPublica -- 11/29/12

Good background on the integration of public consumer behavior databases with voting records.

Best line: "To pinpoint voters who might actually change their minds, the Obama campaign conducted randomized experiments, Slaby said. Voters received phone calls in which they were asked to rate their support for the president, and then engaged in a conversation about different policy issues. At the end of the conversation, they were asked to rate their support for the president again. Using the results of these experiments, combined with detailed demographic information about individual voters, the campaign was able to pinpoint both what kinds of voters had been persuaded to support the president, and which issues had persuaded them."

Obama's 'Moneyball' campaign - Washington Post -- 11/12/2012

Article is by Marc A. Thiessen from the American Enterprise Institute

Best line: "How on earth did Barack Obama, the community organizer, harness the power of data in the 2012 election like a Bain Capital numbers-cruncher, while Mitt Romney’s data-mining effort crashed and burned like, well, Solyndra?...In the coming months, Republicans will spend a lot of time studying why they lost and debating whether they should reposition themselves on issues like immigration. Those are discussions worth having. But they won’t matter one iota if the GOP can’t find a way to join the Democrats in the information age. In 2012, the Republicans were like a bag phone to Obama’s iPhone — when they needed to be a Samsung."

Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win -- 11/7/12

Best line: "But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. 'We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,' he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official 'chief scientist' for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions."

Under the Hood of Team Obama's Tech Operation -- Mother Jones -- 11/15/12

Best line: "Using digital analytics, Team Obama was likewise able to squeeze every last cent out of supporters in ways unimaginable only four years ago. In 2008, with the help of a Google alum named Dan Siroker, the campaign had begun using A/B testing—sending variations of an email or a web page to different groups of people to measure the relative effectiveness of each. In the latest election cycle, that ethos extended to pretty much everything the campaign did, from fundraising emails (sent out in 26 varieties and then analyzed for patterns) to the online donation landing page. By turning its donation process into four steps instead of a single long form, the campaign boosted fundraising from its donations page by 15 percent."

Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight blog has a host of data-centric posts on politics.  Worth looking at.

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Click here for a copy of our white paper on consumerization of IT, C-Change: The Impact of Consumerization of IT.

 

 

2013 Predictions -- Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement -- What Comes Next?

[Note:  We will be doing a webinar on this topic, primarily for NA and SA audiences given the time of day, on Wednesday, December 12 at 2 pm Eastern time.  We'll be doing a second webinar, at a time more convenient for European audiences at 2 pm British time on Thursday the 13th.]

As many readers know, about two years ago a Task Force of AIIM members worked with Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm, among many titles) to build out a "future history" of the content industry.  The intention was to think about how enterprise information technology was changing in the wake of the influx of consumer technologies.  (See Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT: A Sea Change in Enterprise IT.)

The core "story" went something like this...

Organizations spent much of the past 3 decades building out "Systems of Record."

Technologies evolved a great deal during this first phase -- from mainframes to minis to PCs to the internet -- as did the core objects being managed -- from financials to department processes to documents to web pages.  However, at the core of this migration was a continuing focus on building Systems of Record to document who did what to whom, when, and in what context. The transitions looked something like this:

In this world, IT was at the center of deploying enterprise systems, and innovation tended to flow down from large organizations, eventually reaching consumers.

Using another Geoff Moore diagram from Escape Velocity, during this period the Content Management business was very much a "complex systems business," operating on the left "hump" of the diagram below, focused on relatively few customers, dealing with complicated and mission-critical business processes.

Enter Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) in 2007, and the industry began to change.  The left "hump" started to shift to the right.  Price points began to change as "content management" became an increasing part of the core infrastructure of the organization.  Large vendors from the world of complex content management systems initially dismissed SharePoint as "not really ECM" and then struggled to find their role relative to SharePoint as the SharePoint wave intensified. In addition, a host of new enterprise players emerged, built upon a pay-as-you-go SaaS model, led most notably by Salesforce.com.  

Meanwhile, back in the bigger IT market, another revolution was brewing.  

Over the past 5 years, consumer technologies have taken center stage relative to innovation and migrated into the enterprise, with far-reaching implications for how organizations use and deploy technology. These new technologies focus on interactions and conversations rather documents and records and on Systems of Engagement rather than Systems of Record. 

So after a long period in which there really was no "consumer" play in the document/content space (the right volume operations "hump" in Geoff's business architecture model), suddenly one appeared. The focus was not traditional transactionally focused content management, but rather the provision of previously unavailable information management tools for the individual, built upon social and mobile technologies and optimized for the cloud. These were companies with freemium to premium models like Box, Google, Evernote, DropBox, FilesAnywhere, and Yammer.  

These new volume operations players had a very different financial model than those from the complex systems world.  Per Michael Moon from gistics.com, complex systems players focus on making their money on capital expenditures and professional services, with most of the money captured in the early stages of a project -- it is not unusual for 70% of the total revenues for a project to the captured before implementation even occurs.  On the flip side, Systems of Engagement (and the mobile devices that go with them) are brought into the enterprise by the business rather than IT, and with far simpler pricing and deployment models.  The models typically focus on operating expenditures and capturing the majority of revenues after implementation via an annuity stream.

Initially, IT organizations responded to this dichtonomy by either: 1) denying the problem existed (kind of an IT policy re the Dropboxes of the world of "Don't ask, Don't tell); 2) mounting massive resistance and opposition to these tools; 3) allowing adoption, but assuming they would someday get around to the question of integration with existing Systems of Record; and/or 4) some combination of the above.

So the question for this blog post is:  What comes next? What are the next chapters in the story of Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.

We spent some time at the AIIM Board meeting last week exploring this topic, and I'd like to offer some initial thoughts.  

The complete story of the next phase in our future isn't written yet, but I would offer that it will center around the "controlled collision" between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement and will include some version of the following 10 elements:

1. CIOs are beginning to adopt mobile-first and cloud-first strategies for new applications, especially for customer-facing applications, changing the traditional development process.
2. The key to understanding the future role of social technologies in the enterprise is that they will increasingly: 1) be a feature of Systems of Record, not a separate system; 2) either become integrated into core business processes (i.e., the honeymoon period of "social for social's sake" is over) or decline in importance; and 3) ultimately converge with email into a single system.
3. Via migrations from the "right hump," core document and collaboration technologies are now becoming available via the cloud to a host of organizations that heretofore relied on a chaotic mess of file shares.  The trick will be to avoid simply taking c drive and file share digital landfills and moving them to the cloud.
4. True document collaboration (vs. either the poor Word "Track Changes" approach or the chaotic, little editorial control Google Docs approach) will become increasingly important.
5. Effective adoption of social technologies is not just a function of turning them on. Defining use cases, outlining expected behaviors within these use cases, and effectively managing change have just as much to do with success as the technology (check Social in the Flow for details).
6. The "we will never put important information in the cloud" and "we must choose between the cloud and on-prem" militancy is evolving into an awareness that the future lies in a hybrid environment in which information is managed across a continuum of platforms and devices.
7. The concept of synching from the early days of email (remember when we needed to actively manage what we did in email when "connected" and when we were not?) will become increasingly important in thinking about the cloud.  As organizations think about strategies that integrate Systems of Record with Systems of Engagement, that link Saas enterprise applications like Salesforce.com to behind the firewall information repositories, and that allow for responsible deployment of social and BYOD technologies, the cloud will increasingly become the "place" in which synching occurs, with ultimate control by the System of Record.
8. In our desire to reassert control, we need to remember than the needs of the business to get things done will always trump our corporate need for control.
9. The Chief Marketing Officer will own more and more elements of the "controlled collision" and will be increasingly important in the intersection between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.
10. The SoR and SoE "collision" places an increasing premium on those who have skills to help manage this collision and understand the full picture, namely Information Professionals.

What do you think?  What comes next in the "story?" Post a comment and let me know.

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Might be of interest...

1. How to Achieve Best Practices: Records Management
2. How to Conduct a Social Business Assessment
3. How to Unclog Your Business by Automating Content-Intensive Process
4. How to Assess Scanning and Capture Requirements
5. Automating ERM with SharePoint
6. How to Develop Taxonomies to Support Navigation, Information Discovery, and Findability
7. Enterprise Content Management: Impact on Collaboration and Social Business
8. How to Use SharePoint as a Self-Help Knowledge Center

 [Note:  We will be doing a webinar on this topic, primarily for NA and SA audiences given the time of day, on Wednesday, December 12 at 2 pm Eastern time.  We'll be doing a second webinar, at a time more convenient for European audiences at 2 pm British time on Thursday the 13th.] 

7 Pieces of Advice for Those Implementing the #Obama #Records Directive

 Many may have noticed the coverage of the Directive outlining new records management requirements in the federal government. The directive is NARA's and OMB's response to a memo issued by President Obama in late 2011.  Among the requirements outlined in the directive:

 By 11/15/2012, each agency must appoint a Senior Agency Official (SAO)

 By 12/31/2013…

• Each SAO must ensure that permanent records 30 years and older are transferred and reported to NARA
• Each SAO must identify all unscheduled records.
• All federal agencies must have a plan to manage all permanent electronic records in an electronic format by Dec. 31, 2019.
• NARA will issue guidance on managing, disposing of and transferring email.
• A formal career path for records management officials must be laid out.

 By 12/31/2014…

• All agencies must have records management training in place for appropriate staff.

 By 12/31/2016…

• Each SAO, with the agency records officer, must ensure that NARA has received records schedules for all existing non-electronic records.
• All agencies must manage permanent and temporary email records in an accessible electronic format.

In the realm of gratuitous advice, here is my advice to those up and coming SAOs out there (talk about a thankless job!):

[Note: I did an interview with WTOP radio this morning on some of these topics -- a replay can be found HERE.]

1-- Acknowledge that the problem is getting worse.  When (NARA) estimates that 95 percent of agencies are out of compliance with current electronic records requirements, clearly there is a problem that must be addressed.  Add to this the often quoted Digital Universe statistic that the volume of digital information is growing by a factor of 44 during the course of this decade, and you have a recipe for losing a key part of our digital heritage -- institutional Alzheimer's, if you will -- that we will never be able to recover.  And if that was not bad enough, even though the rate of growth of paper records is slowing relative to electronic records, in absolute terms it is still growing.

2 -- Understand and educate about the impact of poor information management on agency effectiveness.  According to our surveys, almost 40% of government officials surveyed have little or no confidence in the accuracy, accessibility and trustworthiness of their electronic information. The percentage rises to 60% for e-mail. 32% of government officials describe the accessibility of records to employees across their organization as "poor" or "very poor."  

3 -- Embrace the concept of T-shaped individuals.  The call in the directive for a career path for e-records management is welcome and overdue.  Everywhere I go, I hear the same refrain, "Most RM staff know paper, not systems," and "Our IT people know storage, not retention." We need to help individuals place their deep-dive competency in a broader information management context if they are going to be effective in the future. Gartner predicts the need for these types of cross-function information professionals will grow by 50% by 2015.  That's what the Certified Information Professional program is all about.  (Assess your skills HERE!)

4 -- Put the focus on getting more data about data.  We will not solve the problem of managing exploding volumes of electronic information by simply putting more "effort" on it or by goading individuals to be more "responsible" in complying with records management requirements.  No one ever woke up in the morning and stretched and proclaimed, "I can't wait to classify my information according to the taxonomy and records retention requirements established by my organization." Auto-classification has come a long way.  The use of semantic technologies to infer metadata where none exists has come a long way.  It's time to step on the accelerator with these technologies.

5 -- Get out of the paper paradigm.  NARA's annual self-assessment by agencies show that printing and filing remains the most common archiving method for email records, with 81 percent of respondents stating they utilize it. The second most common is back up tapes, with 49 percent stating that constitutes an archiving method (agencies could chose more than one method). A large majority of agencies are at high to moderate risk of bad records management. One unnamed agency in the report says they have "no electronic records." Yikes. 

6 -- Think "digital preservation."  The continuing confusion about backup and archiving says to me that we need more education that is centered around the concept of preservation.  I was once many years ago a history major, so I have an appreciation for this concept of preservation, and think it is vastly under-utilized in explain why we care about all of this. The point of all of this is create an accountable history of what we did and how and why we did it. Preservation has 3 dimensions -- 1) people (training is key), 2) technology (PDF/A important here), and 3) commitment (investment in systems). Doing just 1 or 2 of the 3 wont suffice.

7 -- Be realistic. These are challenging times. The mission of your agency is NOT records management. Records are a byproduct or an artifact of the work of your agency, not the actual product.  Sometimes the more zealous of records managers forget that. One recent AIIM survey commenter said, "It is difficult to justify an ERM system when bridges are falling down and people go hungry."  An emotional response, but a real factor in tight times, not just in the federal government, but in any organization. You have to be able to make the argument that effective information management will help make your agency more efficient and product and not just that you "must" to do it.

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 Budding SAOs out there, AIIM can help!  Here are a few places to start.

 AIIM is the leading provider of skills development training on electronic records management.  Thousands of people have taken our ERM courses online, in person, and in private courses.  Sign up for a course today or Contact Thedra White at twhite [at] aiim.org and find out how.

Get our research on best practices. The price is right (hint, they're free).

Check out our Records Management Expert Bloggers.  The content is great.

 

Is Your Organization Worried About Archiving External Social Activity? - Here's a List of 14 Solutions That Might Help

One of the issues I spend some time worrying about is how to balance my enthusiasm for social technologies with the very real concerns that exist as organizations consider the control and compliance realities.

That was one of the reasons we developed our new Social Media Governance course.  This course is a MUST for any organizations deploying social systems, whether they are systems that are externally facing and designed for outside the firewall marketing and communications, or those inside the firewall and designed primarily for customer engagement.

In the context of thinking about this course, we've done a bit of research on the question of whether there are any solutions to help with the following specific use case:

I want my people out promoting our company/organization on external sites (like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter), but I also want a want a way to archive and retain what they are saying.  And I don't want to do anything clunky like: 1) doing individual screen scrapes and somehow archiving them; 2) copying/pasting content from public sites to my internal RM systems; or 3) pre-screening activities BEFORE they do it and push that into some sort of retention system.

Here are some solutions that I have found with the assistance of my colleague Jesse Wilkins.  If I've left any companies out, let me know via a comment and I'll add it to the post.  

Note:  All information below comes straight from COMPANY WEBSITES.  I have not at this point attempted to validate the claims made, I am just trying to get the companies all in one place. Perhaps those experienced with a particular solution might post a comment (no fair competitors slamming others; I'll delete you).  I have also not yet noted in the post which ones are AIIM members and which ones are not, which may be an issue for users to consider in the context of industry commitment.

Some of the companies that follow are great big enterprise solutions, and some are more modest.

In alphabetical order...

Actiance -- http://actiance.com/default.aspx

Socialite Enable provides granular control of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, controlling access to more than 200 features and content areas Socialite Enable also provides pre approval, post review management and archiving of traffic routed through the solution. Socialite Enable includes a number of key features for securely enabling the use of social networks, including:

• Identity Management - the ability to establish a single corporate identity and track users across multiple social media platforms (e.g., @JohnJones on Twitter is the same as JohnHJones on LinkedIn).
• Data leak prevention - preventing sensitive data from leaving the company, either maliciously or inadvertently
• Granular application control - enabling the access to Facebook, but not access to chat or downloading and installing any of the applications in the gaming category.
• Pre-approval or Moderator control - for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, where content is required to be pre-approved by a Corporate Communications Officer or other third party.
• Activity control - the ability to manage access to features, such as who can read, like, comment upon, or access nearly a hundred features.
• Log conversation and content - capture all posts, messages and commentary made to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in context, including exporting to an archive of choice for eDiscovery.

Aleph Archives -- http://aleph-archives.com/

The two main obstacles one encounters when keeping a digital document are that of the fragility of storage medium and that of technical obsolescence. Websites archiving, moreover, raises the problem of selecting and gathering data from complex websites (national libraries for example). As digital documents, websites are particularly complex elements. They are made of several types of media : text, images, sounds, animations and streams.  There are two ways to consider how to archive a website :

• Manual or semi-automatic archiving, which aims at collecting sites according to a determined selection.
• Automatic archiving with the help of indexation robots. These robots visit websites on a regular basis and capture them either partially or totally (as snapshots).

Web collecting platform CAMA^® is part of that last category and aims at completing the following :

• CAMA^® robots collect contents regardless of internal website architectures and publishing platforms.
• As opposed to other tools which can change your way to view a Web archive, accessing an archive in CAMA^® is natural, smooth (click-and-run model) and completely logical (no URL rewriting, no Javascript injection, etc.)
• Your stored data’s authenticity is guaranteed by CAMA^® as unaltered by human hands.
• CAMA^® gives you the choice to use your archives with other analysis tools (such as linguistic software) as it is based on a open and normalized WARC storage format (ISO 28500:2009).
• CAMA^® offers a friendly and natural access to your archives. Access servers are available within your infrastructure or on-line as PaaS (Platforms as a Service)

ArchiveSocial -- http://archivesocial.com/

ArchiveSocial is a social media archiving solution for business compliance and legal protection. ArchiveSocial automates record keeping from networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It is designed to address record keeping challenges for businesses in industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare, government, and education. Key benefits:

1. Designed for social media: ArchiveSocial interfaces directly with each service to archive records regardless of device or network used to post content. Unlike solutions built on email and web archiving technology, ArchiveSocial preserves social media records in their native format. This enables far superior search, export, and records management capabilities.
2. Built for compliance and legal protection: ArchiveSocial satisfies strict industry regulations including those such as SEC 17a-4 and FINRA 10-06 in financial services. Records are digitally timestamped to prove authenticity and can be utilized as legal evidence. Data is stored safely and securely in a SAS 70 Type II-compliant data center.
3. Accessible to business of all sizes: As a pure cloud based solution, ArchiveSocial enables any organization to sign up online and start archiving in a matter of minutes. We offer subscription plans suitable for any business ranging from individual business owners to enterprises. There is no software to install and no long term contract required. 

 

Arkovi -- http://www.arkovi.com/

Originally built by financial services professionals for financial services professionals, Arkovi today also serves the social media archiving needs of companies and entities in the pharmaceutical, government and education fields.  As you archive your material, you can monitor it to learn more about your customer base. Analyzing stored content can help you develop fresh insights that can be applied to new initiatives.

Key benefits:

• Archive Rather than “archive and forget” (until there is a problem), users can tap into the hidden power of their social media and web site activity in real time
• Access “Always on” archiving provides instant access to users for all stored content 24/7
• Analyze Use “lessons learned” in real time to apply to your next communications effort
• Monitor Checking social media conversations keeps marketers informed of new possibilities – and problems to avoid
• Convert When you tap into the energy in your archive, you open the door to converting prospects into new clients
• Engage Multiple users can set rules and coordinate all activities through customized analytics and content dashboards

Backupify -- https://www.backupify.com/

Simple, automated backups of your personal, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and other social media & web apps accounts. Perfect for personal users, small businesses and social media professionals.

Next Point (CloudPreservation) -- http://www.cloudpreservation.com/

The Cloud Preservation service automatically crawls your web properties at chosen intervals, building an archive of html source code and resources, high quality snapshots, and a robust full-text search index. It's your secure, forensically sound answer to regulatory obligations and e-discovery readiness.

The service makes it a breeze to go back in time with all of your Web sites, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to search content, preview records, and produce or export your data.

Hanzo Archives -- http://www.hanzoarchives.com/

Hanzo provides comprehensive and dynamic website archiving products and services, which enable you to collect, archive, preserve and produce your social media interactions and conversations. Our social media archiving is based on the same proven technologies and methodologies we use for website archiving, used by our clients in many regulated industries and sectors, as well as in e-discovery.

Being native format web-based technology, we’re capable of collecting any web content, including publicly accessible websites, blogs, forums, Video, Flash, and wikis. This native format approach to archiving social media enables us to offer the broadest support for many social networks, and indeed enables us to expand on the usual definition of social media, beyond Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to include your blogs, blog commentary, question and answer services, customer forums, YouTube, wikis, etc.

As with our website archiving services, our social media archiving services are backed up by our technology leadership, SAS-70 certified data centre, FINRA and SEC 17a-4 compliance, and more.

Our website and social media archives can be integrated with other enterprise archives using our Web Archive Connector, including the market leading enterprise archive platform from Symantec, with Web Archive Connector for Symantec Enterprise Vault.

Iterasi -- http://www.iterasi.com/

Archive social media content from accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Authenticating and connecting through these network's API's allows us to capture both publicly available data and data stored behind password protection (e.g. Direct Messages on Twitter and Messages on Facebook).

Capture many types of social media data—status updates, group discussions, photos, videos, private messages, friend lists, events, profiles, pages and more.

Our capabilities grow every day. If you need to archive data from other social networks we can capture content through RSS feeds, page capture and other methods.

LiveOffice (Symantec) -- http://www.liveoffice.com/

Many organizations are looking for the safest way to integrate social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, into their regular business communications. However, the attractive qualities of social media, such as its immediacy and broad reach, also make it a potentially risky business tool that must remain discoverable in the event of a lawsuit.

As a result of social media's rising popularity in the corporate world, many organizations are searching for ways to properly capture and supervise this content type. The good news is that some archiving solutions now offer built-in functionality that can help organizations meet their e-discovery and compliance requirements surrounding social media communications.

Below are questions to ask archiving vendors about their social media capabilities:

• Can the solution capture all messages from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in a centralized repository?
• Are all messages/posts searchable in the event of an e-discovery request or compliance audit?
• Does the solution allow administrators to define specific usage privileges?
• Does the solution allow designated personnel to review, approve or reject messages before they are posted?
• Does the solution automatically enforce pre-determined policies?
• Does the solution meet FINRA guidance for social media capture? (Applies only to registered securities firms.)

Page Freezer -- http://pagefreezer.com/

PageFreezer uses crawling technology, similar to that of Google, to take snapshots of your website. Archiving is an automated process, saving you time. Only new webpages and changes to webpages are archived, saving storage space. PageFreezer offers the unique feature to browse through a website exactly as it appeared live online on a specified date.

PageFreezer places a digital signature and a digital timestamp on each archived page. The Digital Timestamp is evidence of the time the page was archived and the Digital Signature provides evidence that the page was not changed since it was archived. These features can be used in court to demonstrate that the archived page is the page as it existed on your web site at that time.

Archives are securely stored in a SAS-70 compliant data center with excellent firewall protection. For added protection against disaster, a copy of your website archives is stored in a second location thousands of miles away. When requiring a local copy for any reason, you simply request a data export in XML format of all media, including HTML, PDF, TXT, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, XML, CSS or even Flash.

Smarsh -- http://www.smarsh.com/

End-to-end social media compliance solutions from Smarsh give organizations of all sizes the preservation, supervision and policy controls to embrace the emerging regulatory requirements to review and archive content from social networking sites Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter. 

Firms can automate policy company-wide, define which social networking features employees have access to, and review, approve, or reject messages before they are posted. Compliance officers and inside legal counsel will be able to monitor both static and interactive corporate communication with ease and intelligent functionality. All messages are captured, preserved in their native form and indexed in the secure Smarsh archive. Postings will be indexed and searchable via message criteria, including date and content keywords.

Selected postings can then be produced on-demand, assigned to multiple reviewers, or marked or tagged as "complaint" or "advertising" for compliance and supervisory review. All administrator activity is logged and quantifiable, illustrating policy enforcement and evidence of review for social media compliance. An audit trail captures data on every visual inspection of each posting in the social media archive and compliance officers can quantify social media data with comprehensive reporting functionality. Customizable organizational usage reports and evidence of supervision/policy enforcement can be created for review as evidence of a reasonably designed policy

Socialware -- http://www.socialware.com/

Reduce time and effort developing your company’s social media compliance policy. Start with best-in-class templates we have created from our work with more than 125 financial services firms. Then, use our industry-leading compliance software to exercise feature-level accesss control. Manage an unlimited number of group policies so that thousands of employees can seamlessly and directly access Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Compliance teams easily scale social media coverage across thousands of financial professionals using Socialware workflows and automated processes. Users create profiles and submit them for approval in an intuitive manner. Compliance officers are notified automatically about profile changes. This lowers the burden and barriers for compliant user access and also social media supervision for your compliance team.

Social media compliance requires firms to capture, record, and archive 100% of social conversations. Compliance officers know that, using Socialware, all data is retained correctly regardless of device. We provide native integration with email archiving systems to conform to your existing processes. Because context is vital for compliance, our software also records complete conversation threads.

 

Sonian -- http://www.sonian.com/

Sonian Social Media & Instant Message Archiving for Businesses.  Sonian IM Archive™ is powering the next generation of message data management solutions. Designed for the broadest range of supported communication formats, low cost of provision, and seamless integration with existing systems, Sonian IM Archive is the ideal fit for today’s IT challenges and completes any message product offering.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instant Message are Becoming the Preferred Form of Business Communication.  Critical and casual business communication is taking place every day via Instant Messaging (IM), Text Message (SMS), and Social Media. Addressing these mediums are a necessary part of achieving better business practices. Sonian IM Archive™ integrates IM, SMS, and Social Media data with present future messaging solutions, helping to achieve compliance and reduce the cost of eDiscovery research and regulatory oversight.

Deploy your Instant Message or Social Media Archive Quickly with Zero Maintenance.  Sonian IM Archive™ is easy to deploy, requires zero maintenance, and automatically adapts to the evolving IM, SMS, and Social Media technology landscape.

Your Social Media, IM, & SMS Communications Should be Compliant.  It is important to know that IM, SMS, and Social Media are subject to the same industry and governmental regulations as email.  Sonian works with you to bring compliance obligations within your reach.

ZL Technologies -- http://www.zlti.com/

Through its suite of social media archiving solutions, ZL Unified Archive® enables businesses to capture, index, search, review, preserve and produce chats and messages from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and RSS Feeds in order to meet legal and regulatory demands.

System administrators can monitor social media communications and promptly report on irresponsible corporate use. With extensive auditing capabilities, ZL is able to capture all user or administrator actions, changes, and configuration modes. Administrators can quickly quantify data by creating customized reports detailing audited activity.

ZL UA uses deep content analysis and contextual filters to provide supervisory review of all outbound and inbound communications. Messages are flagged using a lexical system that can be edited to align supervision requirements with internal and external policies.

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AIIM's Social Media Governance Course covers the topics below.  Contact us today to find out how to set up a private course for your organization and/or how to access these courses on-line.

The course covers the concepts, processes, and technologies required to govern social media tools and processes, both internal and external and across the enterprise. The course is available online or as a two-day instructor-led classroom course.

• Information Governance in the Age of Social Media
• How to Develop Social Media Policies
• How to Conduct a Social Business Assessment
• How to Identify Organizational Social Media Accounts
• How to Identify and Capture Social Content as Records
• Social Business Content and Public Records Requirements
• Internal vs. External Social Media Tools
• How to Use Social Technologies in Regulated Industries
• How to Produce Social Content in Response to Legal or Regulatory Requests
• How to Monitor Social Media for Relevant Discussions
• The Social Business Roadmap
• Social Media Roles & Responsibilities

Get more information on AIIM's Social Media Governance Course.

 

 

 

 

 

It's Not too Early to Make Plans for the "Real" AIIM Conference - #AIIM13

Here in the Washington, DC area, it's the second day of summer and the temperature is 100 degrees.  I don't know about the rest of you, but we haven't even closed Q2 of 2012. So it may seem like a strange time to be thinking about plans for 2013.  But it's not too early.

The REAL AIIM Conference will be March 20-22, 2013 in New Orleans (#AIIM13).  The awesome keynotes already confirmed include Seth Godin, David Pogue, David Weinberger, Connie Moore, John Underkoffler, and Thornton May.  The theme? Extreme Information: Volume, Variety, Devices.

The reason I say the "real" AIIM Conference is that a lot of people still confuse the AIIM Conference with the Info360 event.  This past year -- for the first time in a decade -- we launched a brand new AIIM Conference in San Francisco.  The intention was to create a new kind of event -- decidedly NOT a trade show, but an intimate event designed around networking, world class content, the best keynotes we could find, the edges of technology, and most importantly -- drumroll, please -- it was designed around the needs of the actual paying attendees of the event.  The event was an overwhelming success -- we sold out both the sponsorships and registration weeks before the event.  My favorite comment summarizing everything we were trying to do in our launch was a post-event tweet from an attendee who said he had been to both South by Southwest and the AIIM Conference, and AIIM was way cooler.

Hence the comment about the "real" AIIM conference, and also the need to make advance planning. We don't want to leave anyone out.

A couple of links that may be useful in your planning...

The AIIM Conference 2013 web page is now live – www.aiimconference.com

There is a call for Papers - http://www.aiimconference.com/Call-For-Papers/Call-for-Papers-Guidelines (There’s a link to the form on this page)

A PDF outlining sponsoring opportunities is available - http://pages2.aiim.org/AIIM_2013_Sponsor_Inquiry.html

If you'd like to get notified when the program information is ready and online registration is available, you can get on the list here - http://pages2.aiim.org/AIIM_2013_Get_Notified.html

See you in Nawlins!

Some thoughts on ECM solution provider sales effectivness

For those whose email clients do not support embedded content - here is the direct link to my short piece on Sales Effectiveness.

http://youtu.be/3mMDPZ5Xyjw

Have you downloaded my super cool OccupyIT: Technology Manifesto?

Enterprise information management on #mobile #steroids

Information Management on Mobile Steroids

View more presentations from John Mancini

Note:  See Becoming a Process Revolutionary for the back story re the somewhat cryptic Walgreens slides.

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Help revolutionize your organization's processes.  Become a Certified Information Professional.  Get a free white paper that explains why.

Test your skills.  Take our Certified Information Professional assessment.

Get it while it's hot - CIP Study Guide on Kindle.

Martyn Christian from @Kofax on #AIIM and the #CIP (Certified Information Professional)

Martyn Christian is Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Kofax. He is responsible for all marketing initiatives, including brand, product, industry and field marketing functions. Martyn has more than 25 years of marketing and general management experience within the software industry.

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JM:  Martyn, you rejoined the AIIM Board last year.  What drove you to commit to a "second term?"

MC:  The Information Management industry is unique in its ability to reinvent itself, which means new opportunities from a personal and professional standpoint. My first term on the board was a significant learning experience for me, as well as a chance to give back to the industry that has given me a wide range of great career opportunities for more than 20 years.

JM:  As you think about Kofax's employees and customers and partners, how can AIIM be of greatest assistance?

MC:  I am absolutely “captured” by the CIP program. I think it is really what the industry needs to get to the next level of relevance and growth. I want everyone at Kofax and all our partners and customers to embrace it. It should give everyone the chance to contribute even more fully to the market as well as fuel our company’s growth.

JM:  You just became the second AIIM Board member to pass the Certified Information Professional exam.  Tell me a little bit out the experience.

MC:  I believe Michael Croal (from Cornerstone Advisors) from beat me to be first. I have been in the industry for 20+ years so I assumed I could get a substantial way down the certification process  without significant study time. It turned out I could, but the certification test highlighted for me that I need to continue striving to keep current and broaden my personal knowledge base via AIIM and other best practice sources.

JM:  How important do you think information professionals will be to Kofax in the year's ahead?

MC:  Information professionals are becoming essential, it’s just a matter of time.

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Help revolutionize your organization's processes.  Become aCertified Information Professional.  Get a free white paper that explains why.

Test your skills.  Take our Certified Information Professional assessment.