On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 9:54 AM, Steve Bailey - JISC infoNet
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi Peter,
The point I make in the blog is that many working in IT are
steadily beginning to recognise (or are being asked to by their management) many
of the considerations and issues that we would consider as being 'records
management' issues.
I don't disagree. I see it myself. unfortunately many in IT are rushing off making decisions without considering the implications of their decisions and failing to ask for help. Many work in organizations that do have RM functions, but they fail to work with those individuals.
As I also say in the blog, records management
is more about a particular perspective and view on certain elements of the
management of information, rather than representing some specialist programming
code or professional skill such as medicine. As such the reason why IT
have not understood archiving or have previously promoted the retention of all
emails is because they have never had a professional need to look at these
issues from another perspective – not that they are somehow incapable of
doing so.
It's not so much that they didn't have a need to look at the issues from another perspective it is because they have always looked at it from a technical perspective. The problem also lies with the misinformation put forth by various publications like this one
"Sarbanes-Oxley regulations require that all of an enterprise's electronic
records be retained for five years"
http://shrinkster.com/1462or IT decides to ignore that other perspective. Here is a real world example about 15 years ago I worked for a company that was implementing email. no more cables, no more early morning telephone calls with the other side of the world. As the RM for the company I raised the issue of issuing a policy on how email was to be used as well as what emails needed to be kept. A lot of my recommendations were made based upon what had happened as a result of the Armstrong v White House email lawsuit (one of the first if not the first cases involving email). I was basically ignored. At the end of 6 months IT went back management saying they needed to purchase another Exchange server since the first one was now full. At the end of another 6 months they went back hat in hand (this is 1 year after implementing email) to management saying much like Oliver Twist "please sir may I have some more?" Yes they wanted a third server. Management said "what!" I just bought you a second server 6 months ago, what is going on? Well sir it too is full up. To which management said (amazingly to me) No! Get rid of some of those emails. That is when they came to. Unfortunately I was soon to leave for brighter pastures. That was when I realized that being a records manager is like being Cassandra, we can put forth all the warnings we want, but we will get ignored. maybe IF IT had worked with me in the beginning we wouldn' t have had the problem.
Now that the IT industry is on the cusp of realising that it is
not all about the creation and storage of more information but the effective
management, preservation (and even deletion) of the information you already
have those same bright sparks will not take long to articulate the problem and
find automated, scalable and workable ways of dealing with it.
they may be on the cusp but management is the one forcing to that realization because many of IT's decisions have come back to hurt organizations because IT's attitude of keeping everything has created problems.
I think we're saying much the same thing, but I'm a bit more hesitant in thinking that IT is finally getting "it" what ever "it" is.