Thursday, March 16, 2006
Neil Lang's talk on ERM to the 8 March RMS London Group meeting
These are the notes I took whilst listening to Neil tell us of his learnings from implementing ERM at the Department of Constitutional Affairs.
DCA have recently hit the finishing line in terms of rolling out the ERM system to desktops. There is still lots to do in terms of spreading good records management practice and improving usage rates on the system. The system will be re-launched after Easter as EDRM – encouraging staff to use this for everyday document management as well as holding corporate records.
Implementing ERM is so difficult because it involves such a major culture change.
Software and Useability
ERM software is still immature. Even products that have been through several revisions still do not completely seamlessly integrate with Office tools and are not yet sufficiently intuitive and easy for people to use.
The standards against which ERM systems have been judged in the public sector are driven by the records management agenda. There is very little on usability in the National Archives statement of requirements for ERM. There is bit more on usability (but not much more) in MoReq . Implementing ERM systems will always be a hard slog if they are seen by users as a hindrance to getting their work done.
Benefits
In many areas, ERM does not save users time. People are used to the Microsoft environments were you can drag and drop documents and e-mails from one place to another. In ERM they normally have to comply with naming conventions (e.g. re-titling their e-mails) and navigating around the corporate folder structure to find the right place to put them.
Most of the benefits of ERM are corporate benefits rather than immediate benefits for the individual user. Users will get benefit from ERM but these benefits take time to come through. If I save my important documents and e-mails into the ERM system now, it will help me in 6 months time when I look back at that work. But it won’t benefit me immediately because I can usually find my recent documents and e-mails fairly easily anyway (or believe I can!).
If people defer filing their documents into EDRM they end up with a lot of ‘housekeeping’ work to do, which is normally unappealing – so promoting EDRM as a daily habit is very important.
ERM and Freedom of Information
ERM does work, when used properly. DCA recently had several FOI requests that involved searching for some information held on the ERM and some held outside the ERM on people’s shared drives and e-mails. It was far easier to find the relevant the information from the ERM.
Making the business case
The emphasis in business cases has changed. It used to be on financial savings, normally expressed in terms of the time saved by staff compared to paper-based records management (e.g. in looking for information, filing etc..). But such statistics assume paper-based records management is being done properly in the first place. Although the savings across a Department, when totaled for the whole year may look impressive, it is very difficult to turn small savings (20 minutes saved here and there on filing or retrieving records) into whole person savings.
More recently business cases have tended to focus on the benefits of better information governance and risk avoidance, rather than looking for cashable savings. While ERM is capable of delivering efficiency savings, the timescale tends to be a lot longer than a conventional business case, in order to deliver a positive net present value.
DCA have recently hit the finishing line in terms of rolling out the ERM system to desktops. There is still lots to do in terms of spreading good records management practice and improving usage rates on the system. The system will be re-launched after Easter as EDRM – encouraging staff to use this for everyday document management as well as holding corporate records.
Implementing ERM is so difficult because it involves such a major culture change.
Software and Useability
ERM software is still immature. Even products that have been through several revisions still do not completely seamlessly integrate with Office tools and are not yet sufficiently intuitive and easy for people to use.
The standards against which ERM systems have been judged in the public sector are driven by the records management agenda. There is very little on usability in the National Archives statement of requirements for ERM. There is bit more on usability (but not much more) in MoReq . Implementing ERM systems will always be a hard slog if they are seen by users as a hindrance to getting their work done.
Benefits
In many areas, ERM does not save users time. People are used to the Microsoft environments were you can drag and drop documents and e-mails from one place to another. In ERM they normally have to comply with naming conventions (e.g. re-titling their e-mails) and navigating around the corporate folder structure to find the right place to put them.
Most of the benefits of ERM are corporate benefits rather than immediate benefits for the individual user. Users will get benefit from ERM but these benefits take time to come through. If I save my important documents and e-mails into the ERM system now, it will help me in 6 months time when I look back at that work. But it won’t benefit me immediately because I can usually find my recent documents and e-mails fairly easily anyway (or believe I can!).
If people defer filing their documents into EDRM they end up with a lot of ‘housekeeping’ work to do, which is normally unappealing – so promoting EDRM as a daily habit is very important.
ERM and Freedom of Information
ERM does work, when used properly. DCA recently had several FOI requests that involved searching for some information held on the ERM and some held outside the ERM on people’s shared drives and e-mails. It was far easier to find the relevant the information from the ERM.
Making the business case
The emphasis in business cases has changed. It used to be on financial savings, normally expressed in terms of the time saved by staff compared to paper-based records management (e.g. in looking for information, filing etc..). But such statistics assume paper-based records management is being done properly in the first place. Although the savings across a Department, when totaled for the whole year may look impressive, it is very difficult to turn small savings (20 minutes saved here and there on filing or retrieving records) into whole person savings.
More recently business cases have tended to focus on the benefits of better information governance and risk avoidance, rather than looking for cashable savings. While ERM is capable of delivering efficiency savings, the timescale tends to be a lot longer than a conventional business case, in order to deliver a positive net present value.
# posted by James @ 4:53 PM 
