My colleague James Lappin (Thinking Records Ltd) recently hosted and facilitated a podcast with me, Steve Baily – senior adviser on records management issues for JISC infoNet and author of the hugely successful and thought-provoking book ‘Managing the Crowd, rethinking records management for the web 2.0 world‘ and Elizabeth Lomas, PhD Researcher at Northumbria University. I was indeed in esteemed company!
For me this was an opportunity to air the views I had previously blogged about regarding a perceived disinterest or lack of understanding in the public sector (and possibly elsewhere) of how the Web 2.0 world is making traditional records management policies and procedures largely redundant and in some cases completely unworkable.
The podcast (Episode 4)Â last 46 mins and covers the following points:
- what impact is Web 2.0 having on the way organisations are keeping their records?
- are current records management practices and standards still adapted to the web 2.0 world with its increased volume, and pace of information exchange, increased diversity of systems and increased pace of technological change?
- what kind of record keeping would be suited to the web 2.0 world? Will the web 2.0 world result in organisations keeping records in a completely different kind of way?
This may be a dry subject for some people, but whichever side of the coin you’re on – the dynamic and relatively undisciplined world of Web 2.0 or the highly disciplined and structured world of records management, I think you’ll soon be affected one way or another since many of the issues go to the heart of how information is created, used, published and destroyed – or not, as the case may be. It’s certainly a polarising topic with few opportunities for sitting on the fence. Either we accept that information creation is increasingly user-centric and we adapt policies, procedures and technology to cope with this, or we continue to throw money and resource at ECM and EDRM systems based on increasingly redundant policies and procedures that assume centralised control and management of information. Whatever you believe, there is a tension in the system that is going to lead to something breaking somewhere, and soon.
If you have an opinion – let’s hear it!
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