I couldn’t agree with Peter more, having just returned from a long assignment working on a project to configure, customise and implement an ERMS. 

I was working with a wonderful team of IT professionals who had no difficulty in working with detailed functional specifications but who - as they freely admitted – couldn’t develop these specifications because they lacked ‘technical knowledge of records management’.  As the project progressed, their questions were about ‘why’ rather than ‘what’ – ‘Why  is that necessary?’, ‘Why do we need to control that?’ and so on – questions to which the records managers had the answers.  I should say that our IT colleagues were highly qualified in their own fields and had no difficulty in grasping some ‘technical knowledge of records management’ when it was clearly explained, but they didn’t assume that this made them ‘records managers’.  Likewise, a little knowledge about how such systems ‘work’ doesn’t make records managers into IT specialists.  The project was successful because both ‘IT and RM’ took the time and made the effort to get ‘on the same plane’, building bridges between their respective fields of expertise.  [On the other hand the external system integrators, who claimed to know all about records management, clearly knew very little and did not want to learn].  Perhaps this was partly due to a very clear management direction that ‘records management’ was responsible for specifying what was required and ‘IT’ was responsible for delivering it.  Mostly, it simply made sense to the two teams of specialists involved.  This kind of collaboration is clearly a critical success factor for such a project yet, still, it’s unusual.  I find it’s more often the case that both sides adopt unnecessarily adversarial positions – despite ‘management instructions’ to cooperate – apparently lacking the will or skill to pool their expertise and, consequently, digging tunnels which do not connect.  The outcomes are all too predictable.

All organisations embarking on such projects will be better served if both ‘IT and RM’ focus more on respectful collaboration and less on ‘who is winning’.  You don’t make yourself look good by making somebody else look bad.

Elizabeth Parker
Director & Principal Consultant
Emmerson Consulting Limited

Office:             +44 (0)1388 488865
Mobile:            +44 (0)7932 265569

-----Original Message-----
From: Archivists, conservators and records managers. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Kurilecz
Sent: 04 February 2009 13:58
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: 30 Year Review

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 6:17 AM, Steve Bailey - JISC infoNet <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

My point, as elaborated on in a subsequent blog post this morning
http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-on-end-of-records-managem
ent-as.html is that IT people *do* (or at least very shortly will) have
the expertise and skills required to do this, and that this, combined
with their existing technical skills, will make for a more complete
package than we can offer.  As a result it seems natural that
organisations will look to them, rather than records managers, for the
answers to the kinds of questions and issues that they are facing.

I'll have to respectfully disagree with the idea that IT people have the expertise. I am heavily involved with assisting companies in the implementation of ERMS and I spend quite some time on each engagement working to make sure that IT and RM are on the same plane and not talking past each other. They have the technical knowledge, but... The IT folks are like (and this is a compliment) a good auto mechanic they know how the car works and can put one together following the instructions, but without the plans put together by the designer the mechanic wouldn't know where to begin. As long as IT continues to misuse words like 'archive' when they mean storage or they recommend the capture and storage of ALL emails regardless of content there will always be a need for RM's hand on the tiller. It takes both sides to put together a good ERMS, but it has to be balanced.

Peterk

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Peter Kurilecz CRM CA
[log in to unmask]
Richmond, Va