Wellsprings of Change for RIM

RIM (records and information management) professionals work in programs that are constantly affected by change – in workforce demographics; technology; the legal, regulatory, and competitive environments; use of information; and expectations of how RIM will contribute to enterprise goals.

Bruce W. Dearstyne, Ph.D.

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The signs of change are constant. At last spring’s Microsoft CEO Summit, Chairman Bill Gates pointed to the worldwide adoption of technology as the catalyst for “the digitization of the economy,” in which global business and education are often conducted online. He also referred to the new “digital work style” of workers who, because of collaborative technologies and the Web, have unprecedented interconnectedness that allows them access to information about their own and their competitors’ businesses and the ability to collaborate with global partners.

Accenture, the largest consultant company in the world, identified “Eight Trends That Are Transforming IT,” creating a new “technology ecosystem.” They include:

  • seamless interoperability
  • customized, process-centric IT
  • new methodologies for IT projects handled by onshore-offshore teams
  • adaptive enterprise intelligence systems for better enterprise resource planning
  • a new generation of collaborative tools

IBM, often a bellwether of change in the information arena, last fall announced a major expansion of its collaborative software portfolio “to help customers improve productivity, business networking, and knowledge sharing.”

These and other strategic changes are intended to make the management of information more effective, to help it buttress enterprise goals, to ensure that it fosters collaboration and sound decision making, and generally to wring more value out of it. Information is being recognized as a central organizational asset, which poses both challenges and opportunities for RIM professionals.

Six Emerging Trends Affecting the Current and Future Course of RIM

1. Aligning Information Policies with Enterprise Goals

In the past, records and information policies often focused on administrative objectives of efficiency, economy, legal compliance, and getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Those goals remain valid, but with the growing centrality of information to enterprise operations, RIM programs face a higher challenge: demonstrating contribution to enterprise goals. One way to achieve that is to develop policies that clearly tie information work to goals identified by top organizational executives. A few recent examples:

Treasury Board of Canada, Policy on Information Management (2007). “The availability of high-quality, authoritative information to decision makers supports the delivery of programs and services, thus enabling departments to be more responsive and accountable to Canadians,” it says. “Managing information and records … supports managers’ ability to transform organizations, programs and services in response to the evolving needs of Canadians.” This policy document is particularly adept at integrating records and information policy.

National Archives of the United Kingdom, a New Vision for the National Archives, 2006-2011 (2006). In addition to a commitment to guaranteeing the survival of today’s information for tomorrow’s users and a promise to “bring history to life for everyone,” the Archives asserted a major role in assisting government-wide digital information management. Its strategic plan discusses the challenge of today’s “volatile world of information” and the need to better manage information to get the most from information assets. It also pledges to be a leader in helping the public section understand the importance of managing information and to create an infrastructure to support this and other information-related goals.

2. Assembling Information for Decision Making

In this area, there are four important but inconsistent trends that may be of interest to RIM professionals; each has implications for how information is created, managed, and used. They may all be at work simultaneously in an organization, complicating the challenge of setting priorities for assembling information and records for decision making.

Gathering, filtering, assembling, and summarizing information for key decisions. In this approach, decision makers carefully develop a process for decision making. They gather a good deal of information themselves but, more importantly, they encourage their staff members to pour through information and provide advice based on their analysis.

Michael Roberto, an expert on decision making, espouses this rather information-and-consultation-intensive approach for decisions that are high stakes,where there is novelty and ambiguity, and where the decision will mean a substantial commitment of resources.

Using information technology to let the group recommend or make the decision. In this approach, managers involve large numbers of informed people either in providing input or in settling on a course of action. This strategy requires three things: a sizeable cadre of informed, engaged people; availability of relevant information; and superb technology to connect the people and the information.

IBM held the largest online brainstorming session ever, InnovationJam, in 2006, involving more than 150,000 employees, customers, academics, and others from 104 countries to identify emerging business opportunities. The results were so impressive that IBM decided to invest $100 million in the top initiatives identified through the process.

Using information technology to push decision making to the front lines. Better, cheaper technology can be used to provide front-line workers with timely, relevant information; better informed workers can be counted upon to make more and better decisions. “… decision rights will … become more lateralized as information costs plummet, leading to greater power and autonomy at lower levels of the hierarchy – in short, greater decentralization,” contends Harvard professor Andrew McAfee. “… decision rights and information flows are inherently coupled.”

Not allowing information overload to paralyze decision making; going with “gut feelings.” This view, given high profile by Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink and Gerd Gigerenzer’s 2007 book Gut Feelings, argues that intuition – based on deep learning, experience, and reflection – may sometimes enable decision makers to take a quick route to a valid “snap” decision. It runs counter to the three trends noted above; leaders “feel” the decision is right without information gathering. Too much data, too many variables, and too many choices can stifle the process, lead to “analysis paralysis,” and in the end produce a decision that is late and flawed.

3. Increasing Expectations for the Role of Information in Business

RIM professionals are very familiar with the techniques and tools of monitoring and gathering pertinent information from the outside and organizing it for internal administration and control. But three recent trends push the challenge higher.

  • The first, described by Kenneth McGee, asserts a need to identify real-time information to spot trends, avoid surprises, and “surmount events” by taking decisive action. This action involves, for example, very close tracking of production schedules on time-and-resource-critical projects and monitoring customer purchases to make on-the-fly adjustments to production and delivery schedules.
  • The writings of George Day and Paul J.H. Schoemaker exemplify a second trend: the need for “peripheral vision” – spotting “weak signals” in technology, economics, the political landscape, and other settings and acting on them before the competition sees them. Mastery of “peripheral vision” strategies can provide major competitive advantages, but, of course, the work involves a good deal of information identification, sifting, analysis, and “connecting the dots” to see a pattern before it becomes crystal clear.
  • The third trend is much more discussed in public forums, in part because of Ian Ayres popular book Super Crunchers and in business circles because of Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris’ book Competing on Analytics. It contends that the amassing of huge databases, and the use of advanced software and very powerful computers, will enable companies and institutions to develop deep understanding of customer preferences for services and products and yield other strategic insights.

Assuming these trends grow robust and continue, information professionals could play many roles, including:

  • identifying, analyzing, distilling, and interpreting sources of information, particularly for “peripheral vision” strategies
  • assembling, updating, refreshing, and maintaining strategic databases
  • perhaps most important, ensuring that information is maintained in valid recordkeeping systems where appropriate, that the life-cycle concept is applied, and that retention and disposition schedules are developed

4. Using Information to Solve Important Social Problems

This fourth trend outdistances even the theme described in the third trend above in assigning transformational importance to information to dramatically transform institutions. There are several sub-themes: conversion from paper to electronic records will radically streamline services and cut costs; availability of institutional information to outside scrutiny will lead to significantly better management; and better information flow will dramatically change operations.

Perhaps the best current example is a series of authoritative reports on digital health and medical records that assert that switching from paper to electronic formats will dramatically improve healthcare. Electronic medical systems “… will lead to significant healthcare savings, reduce medical errors, and improve health, effectively transforming the U.S. healthcare system,” said a RAND Corporation report, “Extrapolating Evidence of Health Information Technology Savings and Costs.”

Accenture has made it a priority, stating in one of their publications,“Health Care’s Digital Transformation,” that there is
widespread support in the United States and abroad with leaders “… endorsing electronic health records as a critical component of solutions aimed at dramatically enhancing care while reducing costs.”

Accenture, RAND, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and other proponents are now exploring complex, practical-information issues that have dampened a bit of the enthusiasm (and which information specialists could have predicted): conversion costs, need for systemcompatibility and interoperability, privacy concerns, resistance to new information technology, and training challenges.

5. Increasing Role of Information – and Records? – in Litigation Discovery

This fifth trend is familiar to RIM professionals in many companies and other institutions. “Electronic data discovery” (EDD) refers to the judicial process of making electronic information available to the opponent in the initial stages of litigation. Helping to ensure that the information is available when needed is an important responsibility of many records programs these days. But two factors may complicate or frustrate the work of RIM professionals in the future.

The first factor is the tendency in some organizations for other groups – e.g., counsel, CIO – to take the lead and slight or ignore records professionals and RIM programs. Some professional publications, while providing excellent advice on EDD, may encourage this tendency.

For instance, a recent article by William Dodero and Thomas Smith in ACC Docket, the journal of the Association of Corporate Counsel, offers sound suggestions but does not explore the role of RIM professionals.

A recent statement by NASCIO, the association of state chief information officers,”“Seek and Ye Shall Find? State CIO’s Must Prepare Now for E-Discovery!” suggests that the CIOs’ technical responsibilities make them the natural leaders but doesn’t explain the potential role of state records management/archival programs or RIM professionals.

The second potentially complicating factor is the extremely broad definition of what is “discoverable” in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that took effect in December 2006. Furthermore, the definition seems to blur the distinction between record and non-record. Barry Murphy, a principal analyst at Forrester, in a recent interview with Hugh McKellar, explained that:

… the rules make every single piece of content – every e-mail, every IM, everything on [sic] every repository and every hard drive – in an organization a “business record”… The rules basically say that there must be a policy that covers every single piece of content .... now everything is a business records and they all must be categorized and assigned some kind of retention period …

EDD provides an opportunity for RIM professionals to expand their roles, but they will need to assert and clarify their responsibilities and collaborate with counsel, CIOs, IT personnel, and others to sort out the issues of leadership and coordination. They will need to adjust to this broad new definition of what is discoverable but, presumably, judges’ opinions in court decisions will help clarify the definitional issue.

6. Changing Management Approaches

The way organizations are managed helps determine their information needs, strategies, and use and how much records and information programs are valued and supported. Spotting enduring management trends is always difficult, but some new management concepts being espoused and implemented will have an impact on information work – particularly in getting information to empowered “knowledge workers” to foster initiative and innovation.

Two new books, Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management and Jeffrey Pfeffer’s What Were They Thinking?, offer some particularly helpful insights:

  • Capacity for fast-paced change and adaptation will provide competitive advantage.
  • Information technology, particularly the Web and collaborative tools such as wikis, make it possible to organize and manage work in new ways.
  • Use collaborative tools to involve more information seekers and providers and more problem solvers.
  • Managers need to lighten oversight and supervision and give people the space, resources, and tools they need to do their work.
  • Younger workers, in particular, resist red tape and bureaucracy, want a more fluid environment, and expect to find value and meaning in their work.
  • Reduce the volume of e-mails, instant messages, other incoming information, and meetings. Give people more “thinking time.”
  • Managers should provide for greater connections and interoperability between various parts of the company so they work together and not at cross purposes.
  • Improve company self-learning, for instance, by documenting initiatives and after-action reviews.

Implications of These Trends for RIM

The trends described above have several implications for RIM professionals and programs. They will cause:

  • Rising recognition of the strategic value of information
  • A tendency to focus on information needed at a particular time for a particular purpose and to be much less concerned about other information and older information
  • Rising incidence of information being used for purposes other than those for which it was created
  • Lack of clarity over what constitutes a “record” in complex information environments
  • A need to be assertive and inventive when RIM’s role is not clear – and, at the same time, to collaborate with others who have a responsibility or stake in information management
  • Need for strategies and tools to deal with vast quantities of unstructured information
  • Need to balance standard records management practices, e.g., life cycle concept and retention schedules, with new approaches suited to Web 2.0 and large, fluid databases

A Proactive Approach to Wellsprings of Change

Coping advantageously with change requires understanding the forces propelling it, assessing its probable impact, and being adaptive to cope strategically with it. Some informal suggestions for RIM professionals:

  • Select and follow a few sources that provide useful insight into change in the business area or expertise area. (The sidebar below, “Preparing for the Future: Vantage Points for RIM Professionals,” provides some suggestions.)
  • Ask supervisors what they consult to anticipate future changes and consider following some of these suggestions.
  • Use ARMA International’s Records and Information Management Core Competencies (available for free download at www.arma.org) for self-evaluation to identify knowledge and skills that need development.
  • Create a personal development plan, using the results of this self-evaluation. This can include things to do individually (e.g., selective reading) on through an extensive program that is sponsored (or at least paid for) by the organization.
  • Get involved with a dynamic professional organization, taking advantage of local chapters, networking opportunities, publications, and online and face-to face educational offerings.
  • Monitor the best new books on leadership and management, looking for emerging trends that will affect the organization. One helpful guide is the continuing set of reviews of management books by Robert Morris on Amazon.com, www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A26JGAM6GZMM4V/ref=cm_aya_bb_pdp/102-3331054-0260121.
  • Peruse the courses and degree offerings of information schools for insight into what information professionals of tomorrow are studying. An easy access point is www.ischools.org. Some programs of particular interest to RIM professionals:

For a different, and rather dramatic, rendition of some of the recent developments, view at http://mediatedcultures.net/ksu-digg/?p=84 the short video “Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us,” a product of Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography Program, which has had more than 4 million views on YouTube.

 

Sidebar: Preparing for the Future: Vantage Points for RIM Professionals
Here are some suggested sources for tracking emerging trends and developments that will have implications for RIM professionals.

Blogs

AIIM,www.aiim.org/article-aiim.asp?ID=32379 (Particularly interesting are “Industry Watch,”“Knowledge Center,”and “Content Overload.”)

CIO Weblog,The, www.cio-weblog.com/50226711/cio.php (This emphasizes IT developments related to the work of CIOs.)

Harvard Business Online, http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/index_dl.php. (Particularly useful are blogs by Tom Davenport,Gary Hamel, Larry Prusak,and Michael Watkins.)

McAfee,Andrew. http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee. (This focuses on Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and related issues.)

Soat, John.CIO Uncensored (part of Information Week), www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/cios_uncensored/index.html (This is particularly useful on CIO trends and controversies.)

Suarez, Luis.Elsua,www.elsua.net and Elsua:The Knowledge Management Blog, http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/km/elsua.

Journals, Management

Harvard Business Review

Sloan Management Review

Websites, E-Discovery

Sedona Conference, The, www.thesedonaconference.org

Websites, Government

Center for Digital Government, www.centerdigitalgov.com/index.php. (Surveys and reports highlight best practices in the use of digital information in state and local government.)

Center for the Business of Government, www.businessofgovernment.org/index.asp

Institute for Electronic Government, www-01.ibm.com/industries/government/ieg.

Treasury Board of Canada, www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/activity-activites_e.asp (Policy documents relating to information policy, information management, security, and other information topics.)

Websites, Management

APQC, www.apqc.org. (Excellent source on trends in benchmarking and metrics, best practices, productivity, and knowledge management.)

CIO Magazine,www.cio.com(the best place to track issues pertaining to the work of CIOs) White Papers,Reports Accenture.Outlook Online,www.accenture.com/Global/Research_and_Insights/Outlook

Booz Allen Hamilton.Strategy+Business,www.strategy-business.com

IBM. IBM Systems Journal, http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/sjimg.html

_____.Journal of Research and Development,www.research.ibm.com/journal/rdimg.html

 

Bruce Dearstyne, Ph.D., may be contacted at dearstyne@verizon.net.

 From January - February 2008