Thinking Records

James Lappin’s records management blog

Posts by James Lappin

The state of records management in 2013: the challenges

Posted on February 13, 2013

You can tell what issues are current in records management by the questions organisations pose to records management consultants. Here are six situations that I was asked for advice on in 2012:  (whether that is in actual consultancy projects, invitations to tender, or informal questions over the phone!) An organisation delivers projects in challenging environments around the world – areas of military conflict, political strife, economic turmoil and low internet bandwidth. They had developed a corporate records retention schedule.   Project records were spread across several different business applications. They had an application to capture the formal project documents (Project initiation documents, Project close out report etc.). They had an application to capture the contractual documents arising from any procurement done within projects.  Day-to-day e-mail…

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Why a link between MoReq2010 and the OAIS model would benefit both records managers and archivists

Posted on July 13, 2012

The dream of a single record keeping profession It is roughly twenty years since Frank Upward began popularising the records continuum as a paradigm shift away from the previously prevalent records lifecycle model. It was the early 1990s, the digital revolution was about to hit organisations and Upward did not believe that a body of professional thought based on the lifecycle paradigm would cope with it. Upward had both philosophical and practical concerns about the lifecycle model. His philosophical concerns stemmed from the fact that the records lifecycle model depicted records as moving in a straight line through time: from creation of the record, through an active phase (where it is being added to and used); a non-active phase (where it is kept for…

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Information assurance and encryption

Posted on July 4, 2012

Alison Gibney spoke to the June meeting of the IRMS London Group about the relationship between the disciplines of information assurance and records management. Alison differentiated  information assurance from information security.  Information security covers any type of information an organisation wants to protect, whereas information assurance is focused on protecting personal data.    There is no US equivalent term, partly because the US legislation on personal data is less strict than that of the UK. Alison said that in the UK public sector over the last five years records management has gone down a peg or two (thanks to budget cuts) , whilst  ‘information assurance’ has gone up a few pegs.  The rise of information assurance is thanks to the various high profile central…

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Forthcoming extension and plug-in modules to MoReq2010

Posted on June 1, 2012

A unique feature of MoReq2010 when compared to previous electronic records management specifications is the provision for the DLM Forum to publish optional extension modules and plug-ins to extend the compulsory core modules of the specification. This will enable the specification to embrace needs specific to some but not all organisations/sectors, without imposing costs on vendors who intend to develop products that do not service those organisations/sectors. It will also enable the specification to develop over time to respond to new needs created by the ever-evolving world of applications used in business. Yesterday afternoon at the DLM Forum members meeting in Copenhagen I heard Jon Garde announce a list of MoReq2010 extension modules and plug-in modules that would be developed over the coming 12…

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The nature of electronic records – podcast with Ben Plouviez

Posted on March 15, 2012

Between 2004 and 2006 Ben Plouviez (@benplouviez) oversaw the roll out of an EDRM (electronic documents and records management) system across what was then the Scottish Executive (but is now the Scottish Government). Six years later and the system contains 14 million documents and is used by around 4,000 staff. In this podcast Ben reflects even-handedly on both the benefits that having an organisation wide records repository has brought to the Scottish Government, and on the promises that the system has not fulfilled. The roll out of the EDRM was driven partly by the Scottish Executive’s desire to breakdown silos between the various different parts of the administration. They  made the decision that wherever possible files would be open and accessible to the whole of the…

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G-cloud update

Posted on February 18, 2012

This Thursday I went to the tea cloud camp meeting on cloud computing held at the National Audit Office in London for an update on progress with the UK Government’s G-Cloud Launch of Cloud Store We heard that the UK Government’s CloudStore  could go online as early as this weekend. CloudStore will be in effect a catalogue of suppliers who have been accredited by the UK government to provide the government with cloud services.  The accredited companies are grouped under four headings – Infrastructure as a service, Platform as a service, Software as a service (including applications such as EDRM, CRM and collaboration) and Services (including systems integrators). This is a technology shift towards cloud solutions,   but more importantly this is a procurement…

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Why is content migration so difficult?

Posted on February 13, 2012

Migrating content from one application to another is a problem that even now, two decades into the digital age, we have no solution for.  Migrating content is often so labour intensive and complex as to be non cost effective.   Any content migration involves compromises and ommissions that result in a significant loss of quality of the metadata that is held about the content being migrated. Solving the content migration problem is about to become more urgent with the growing popularity of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) variety of cloud computing.  In this model the provider not only provides the software application, they also host your content.  Imagine what would happens if your organisation decided it wanted to change from one SaaS provider to another.  It…

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Talking records – podcast discussion with Christian Walker

Posted on January 29, 2012

In this podcast, Christian Walker and I discuss whether records management is compatible with enterprise 2.0.  We talk about the problems of capturing records into a records systems such as an EDRMS.  We ponder on whether anyone could or should integrate their EDRM with a web service such as Twitter or Facebook. I express mixed feelings about the concept of asking users to declare things as a record. (Chris wrote a blogpost ‘records matter, declaration doesn’t‘ last year, with a more recent follow up). We discuss whether text analytics could be used to automatically select which e-mails should be saved as a record. We conclude that you probably could in isolated areas of your business, that you studied in depth and trained the analytic engine in, but…

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MoReq2010 update

Posted on January 5, 2012

The DLM Forum held their triannual conference in Brussels last month.  The conference brought together archivists and records managers from across Europe.  The DLM forum had earlier in the year published the MoReq2010 electronic records management system specification, and there was much talk of the specification at the conference. The DLM forum released the first sets of test scripts to vendors immediately prior to the conference. This is a significant point in the life of an electronic records management system specification. It means that vendors get to see exactly how their products will be judged by test centres.  This gives them a solid basis for deciding whether or not it will be worth their while modifying their products to comply with the specification.  It…

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What is SharePoint good for?

Posted on November 13, 2011

SharePoint is unique amongst information management systems in that it is rarely purchased with any specific purpose in mind. It is most often bought bundled in with other products when an IT department negotiates an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. This creates a challenge for such organisations. What should they use it for? What shouldn’t they use it for? Giving people out of the box SharePoint team sites and hoping that they do something useful with them produces very variable results. Some teams will make their site work. Many others will either decline to put the effort in to tailor the site to their needs, or will tailor the site but make a bad job of it and the result will be unpopular with their…

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