E-communications and changing organizational contexts

One strand of thought started at October's Witness Seminar Conference explored the idea that the use and management of e-communications could not be considered in isolation from the changing nature of organizations and organizational culture; that the now multifarious and ubiquitous e-communication technologies and practices have both shaped and been shaped by such changes, and that this has profound implications for the way in which records management programmes should be conceived and implemented. A couple of aspects of this theme are summarized here.

There has been a shift from traditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic and largely monolithic business organizations to a networked model involving multiple organizations in multiple jurisdictions. This has been largely enabled through the communications revolution brought about by the use of e-mail and more recent technologies. The processes of a given business function – and the records of those processes – are spread well beyond a single organization, yet many records management programmes are still conceptualized in terms more suited to the traditional organization.

Who owns the records of these processes? Will there come a time when records managers have responsibility for managing a process, or group of processes, across organizational boundaries rather than for managing all the records of a single organization? Of what value is compliance as a ‘big stick’ when the global organization can simply shift operations to more lightly regulated jurisdictions?

A parallel change has occurred in the relationship between organizations and their staff, effectively altering the ‘psychological contract’ entered into by both parties, and in the nature of the work carried out by an increasing number of employees. Again, e-communication technologies both reflect and help power these changes. The organization no longer offers secure employment and employees are, in response, more individualistic and less corporate in their approach to the information and records they create, use and manage. They see these records as their own resource, and as part of the knowledge capital to be accumulated and carried on to their next job.

Furthermore, many employees are now knowledge workers who may work from many locations, including from home, and whose closest links and priorities may not be within their organization at all but with external entities – clients, funding bodies, suppliers, professional peers. This fragmentation of lines of responsibility and blurring of boundaries, coupled with a more individualistic and self-interested attitude to information and records, may require a re-evaluation of an approach to recordkeeping based primarily on corporate guidelines and obligations.

In the same way that the focus for records management may have to shift at the level of the overall business mission to managing the records of the process, not the organization, could it be that the recordkeeping responsibilities of employees will become a matter of individual contractual obligation, tailored to meet the needs and expectations of both employer and employee in each separate case?