What will organisations be doing with their electronic documents and e-mails in 2012? Part 1 & Part 2

Conference 2008 Collaborative Session 1 - Monday 10.30-11.20 & 11.30-12.30

John Wilson

I will be looking at this issue from a number of different angles:

What should organisations be doing with their electronic documents and records in 2012?
Will the requirements have changed? Will organisations acknowledge these requirements?
What will people actually be doing with their electronic documents and records?
How will people be working with electronic information?
Take-up of new technologies - will EDRMS be used, what about Web 2.0?
Will things improve or get worse - for organisations, users and records managers?
What will we as records managers be able to do about it?
What strategies can records managers adopt to cope with electronic document and records management?
Can we/should we be trying to put the genie back in the bottle?

Richard Blake

I will be examine this issue from a number of different angles:

How will the new collaborative technologies impact on requirements for effective records management in 2012?
Will we need to define alternative requirements?
How do we plan to educate users of the unintended impact of the use of these technologies?
Concealing the beast - what can we do to implement records management by stealth?
How can we integrate systems so electronic information is both useable and safeguarded?
Will EDRMS be able to use auto-capture and auto-classification tools - what are the limitations?
How do we assess if the new technologies will be effective - what to clarify and how do we evaluate the benefits versus the risk?
How are we going to plan to sustain access to semi active and archived electronic records? What strategies can be adopted to cope with this challenge?
Can we identify alternative and less costly models to support sustainable strategies?

Tony Hendley

I will be reviewing the following three areas:

Do we need more control and consistency or less? Will we have more corporate centralised and classified content and records management or more distributed libraries accessed via search engines? If the latter how will we manage our paper legacy records?
What will be the future lifecycle for electronic content/documents/records? Will we still break the lifecycle down into active, inactive and archive? Who will be responsible for content/records at each stage? Will we start to outsource the archive function?
What Platforms will electronic documents and records be managed on - Microsoft SharePoint; Production EDRM/ECM Suites; Open Source Software (Alfresco); Google Docs/Sites? Is there one preferred route or will it always be horses for courses?

James Lappin

I will be exploring how the following three developments will pan out over the next five years:

Google's war with Microsoft. Most IT departments are tied into Microsoft's suite of products. Google is trying to bypass IT departments by offering Google Docs (their rival to Microsoft Office) and Google Sites (launched in February 2008 as a rival to Microsoft's SharePoint) directly to individuals and teams via the web. The big downside for organisations is that Google's products are hosted on Google's servers.
The rise and rise of SharePoint Microsoft SharePoint will become an all pervasive collaboration environment. It blurs the distinction between the intranet and your records repository. It enables people to keep documents in feature-rich collaborative websites rather than simple folders. It overcomes some weaknesses of shared drives and hence will squeeze the market for EDRM. But its records management model leaves much to be desired: it does not provide the functionality needed to organise all the collaborative sites generated within a SharePoint implementation.
EDRM at the crossroads. EDRM is a proven technology, with sustained implementations in high profile organisations. But the scale, cost and complexity of EDRM projects means that many organisations have decided to take alternative approaches. The ending of the National Archives (TNA) testing regime has left a big hole. TNA led the EDRM movement with its guidance, specification, testing regime, and its influence across government. The EDRM vendor market has consolidated with acquisitions but they are still minnows compared to Microsoft and Google, two organisations who are increasingly encroaching on their space.

John Wilson, JMW Mosaic Limited

John Wilson is a graduate of King's College (London University) where he gained a joint honours degree in Geography and... more...

Richard Blake, The National Archives

Richard Blake leads the Records Management Advisory Service (RMAS), which is a service provided by The National Archives. National Advisory... more...

Tony Hendley, Cimtech Ltd

Tony Hendley is Managing Director of Cimtech Ltd (http://www.cimtech.co.uk), the UK Centre for Information Management and Technology based at the... more...

James Lappin, Thinking Records

James is a records management consultant and trainer. He writes on records management topics for his blog Thinking Records http://thinkingrecords.co.uk James... more...

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