What does RIM offer?

I took a call from a friend of mine this morning who is still struggling with selling records management internally.  Someone asked him in a workshop the other day

" ok, so thats a nice presentation but seriously, Records Management – why should I care?"

Now most organisations will immediately scream compliance of course!  But this really isn’t the answer.  As organisations; either public or private sector we have to comply with lots of legislation and regulations; health & safety, financial, employment relations related etc. and we do this not because we have to, but because it makes good business sense.

Taking care of our people, our finances, our buildings, is a core part of being an effective and sustainable business, and so is the need to take care of the one thing that permeates all of our activities; our information and records.  The days of making business decisions on “gut feel” are largely over, and while instincts play a part in our processes, we now look to the myriad of information sources we have to help us make the right, most effective decision for our business.  Helping us maximise future opportunities and stopping us from repeating the mistakes of the past.

I can hear many of you saying, yes but that’s information it’s not records.  Really…is it?  Is there a difference?

If you ignore the argument between information and records for a moment, why are we still finding it difficult to answer this question?  What are the benefits of records (and information) management and how do you sell that to your organisations.

I'll start you off:

 - Risk Management and Mitigation

 - Business efficiency

 - Increased organisational knowledge

 - Increased availability of information

 - Reduced cost and time spent in rework

 - Reduced risk of knowledge loss

 - Cost reduction

 - Compliance

  Over to you guys, and lets have some fun with this.

RIM Competencies

Hi guys
Well we had an inredibly interesting inForum convention this year, Im sorry if you missed it but lets keep up one of the conversations we started.

We already have a set of core competencies for records management, but are these still the same now that we are no longer RMAA but RIM Professionals.

So my fellow colleagues are there any competencies missing in our competency pyramid now that we include the 'Information' elemt or do we need to start again?

Recordkeeping and Social Media

There has been a lot of discussion recently on the listserve around the use of Social Media, our obligations and requirements as recordkeeping proffessionals.

In many ways, social media is simply an evoloution. Our proffession is no stranger to the evolution in record formats; clay tablets, papyrus, paper, optical disc, cloud and .....

In much the same way as we struggled, and continue to struggle with managing email as records, we are now faced with a multitude of record formats; physical records, electronic records, records in the cloud and .... what next.

With technology moving at an ever increasing pace, how do we manage social media records? Im sure all of our policies and procedures would define records as being format independent. And while the format doesnt matter, the practicalities of managing social media records does raise its own challenges.

In a presentation last year, we heard from a New Zealand researcher on the various ways in which organisations are managing social media records. In one case, a consultation was conducted via a wiki, at the end of the process, the records were printed, placed on file and stored physically, in around 60 storage boxes.

It seems incredibly strange to print and file, after all we have elaborate and not inexpensive EDRM systems that are designed to enable us to better manage our records, holistically and systematically. Yet, when we looked at our systems, did we think about social media records? How we would capture them? In what format we would capture them, as web pages, as text files, as images?

In the context of social media, where is the record in this process? All? Beginning and end?
Hmmmm, this sounds a little like our early discussions on managing email records doesn't it.

Hooray! We have a blog!

Hooray! We have a blog!

Finally we have a blog!

Okay so it may be looking a bit empty at the moment (totally), but hey its a start!

The plan is to have a “blogfest” on a regular basis, but this is where we need YOU!  What topics do you want, when do you want them etc etc

Our goal is for this to be full of useful information for all of our members to reference.  So with that in mind what would you like to see here?  

Respond and let us know, the choice is yours!