2020 Vision?

[Note: what follows are my individual musings, and do not necessarily represent the views of the AC+erm team as a whole.]

A train of thought that was developing in a vague way in my mind and through discussion with others, until it was derailed by the demands of the festive season, has been started again by reading through the current issue of the Records Management Bulletin. It contains an article by Geoff Smith, with the title ‘Welcome to my Nightmare! The Paperless Office of 2020’. (Before going any further, I wish to make it absolutely clear that this post is in no way critical of the substance of Geoff’s article, which is informative and lively. It is simply that the ‘packaging’, as it were, brought back to mind my pre-Christmas thoughts.)

The article is illustrated with some nifty and professional Halloween- and horror-themed artwork, and contains a further internal subheading ‘The Office of 2020, or Welcome to my Nightmare!’ And it seems to me that a significant proportion of our professional literature and debate on electronic records, documents, and technologies is couched in similar terms, even where the message (as in Geoff’s article) is at least as much concerned with the positive as with the problematic aspects of the digital age. Digital technologies are described in terms of ‘nightmares’, ‘problems’ or, when attempting a more positive note, ‘challenges’; we are warned that we cannot stand still, that these changes will come about whether we want them or not, that we must get on the bus now if we are not to be left behind. What we never seem to contemplate is the possibility that we might actually drive the bus ourselves.

The new technologies – now including the possibilities opened up by Web 2.0 – have radically changed the way that businesses and individuals use and exchange information. They have been seized on avidly (with the facilitation of an IT sector with little or no comprehension of records management or archival concerns) and are being exploited and deployed in the haphazard, chaotic ways with which we are all too familiar, and which form the core of the ‘challenges’ we try to address.

What is too often lost sight of is that this is the chaos of creativity, of individuals and groups experimenting with, exploiting, and delighting in some of the most powerful and potentially empowering tools ever put at the disposal of human ingenuity. Why does it sometimes seem that everyone – from teenagers in their bedrooms to ‘silver surfers’ in their dens, from multi-national corporations to sole traders operating out of their spare rooms, from CEOs to clerical assistants – sees a world of opportunity and possibility where recordkeepers see only problems and obstacles? We worry about how to stop staff from using e-mail or instant messaging or Facebook, when we might have been there at the outset to suggest the technologies to our organizations as innovative ways for creating, sharing and maintaining the information and records needed to carry out business and to preserve corporate and societal memory, while presenting strategies to ensure that their use was compliant with good practice.

For the opportunities are not just opportunities for business but for the records professions, too. In a 1999 article in American Archivist, (‘Integrated Archives and Records Management Programs at Professional Membership Associations: A Case Study and a Model’), Stephen Wagner presents an excellent model and toolkit for managing the records of a highly dispersed national association of over 25,000 nursing professionals, run with a minuscule part-time or voluntary administration throughout the US. This was written in the context of a largely paper environment; think how the recordkeeping requirements of such a body could now be revolutionized by the new technologies! Documents, databases, presentations, and discussions made instantly available for collaboration or sharing on the web through online services and applications provided by, e.g., Scribd, Zoho, Google Docs or Apps. Virtually cost-free video and telephone conferencing through instant messaging services. A free hosted online central repository for all organizational records and documents, cutting out endless sending and hoarding of duplicates in the forms of attachments. The ultimate shared working area; out of the information and organizational silos in one great leap. Easily attainable, too: most of the people likely to read this post could set the whole technological side of it up themselves over the course of a weekend. Of course, there are concerns and difficulties to be addressed; the digital world is not Shangri-La. But the paper world was hardly Utopia either, however rosy it may seem in our retrospective imaginings.

What we are going through is not merely a technological revolution; it is a recordkeeping revolution as well. Yet how often have these possibilities first been brought to the fore by records managers or archivists rather than IT managers or, indeed, individual technologically savvy users? Nine times out of ten, the potential outlined in the previous paragraph – for any organization – will have been raised by someone else, with Records playing the defensive role of pointing out the pitfalls and problems, presenting lugubrious catalogues of Enron-style fiascos as an Awful Warning to the executive board. We need to be the revolutionaries; we need to be the ones placing these solutions on the table first, and letting IT, Legal and the rest play the “Yes, but …” role for a change. We have too often ended up scrabbling around looking for the ‘records angle’ in proposed initiatives, rather than boldly putting forward the initiatives ourselves in the first place and letting others look for their angles. Could this, as well as sheer ignorance, be part of the reason why senior management turns to IT rather than Records Management for solutions to RIM problems?

In posting this, it is not at all my intention to trivialize the difficulties faced in managing records in the modern world or organization; the aim is to stimulate discussion, not to provide a nuanced assessment of the issues involved. But there are prizes out there as well as perils, and it may be that to win them, to make a real investment in the future, the records professions need to make a New Year’s resolution to sell off their shares in nightmares and build up their holdings in dreams.