This is a record

These are the notes I took whilst listening to Stuart tell us of his learnings from implementing ERM at the Department of Trade and Industry .

Breaking new ground
The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) installed the UK’s first major implementation of electronic records management (ERM) between 1999 and 2003. The implementation came in part in response to the Modernising Government target for all UK Government departments to keep newly created records electronically by 2004, but mainly to improve the management of business information.

The Modernising Government target was possibly drawn up on the assumption that ERM was being done already elsewhere in the world. At the start of their project DTI sent a delegation to visit Australia, and spoke to others who had visited Canada and the USA to see how they were getting on with ERM. They found that:

• In Australia there had been a lot of thinking about ERM; a lot of articles written; some software on the market; some organisations who had bought software and used it in the back office or used it to manage paper records. They saw no organisation-wide implementations of ERM in Australia, but obtained a lot of valuable information from the visit.
• Canada appeared to have done less than Australia
• USA appeared to have done less than Canada.
  

DTI realised that they, and the rest of UK Central Government were sailing into uncharted waters. They took a long time over the project. Implementing EDRM was a massive change to the way people work and DTI tried to manage it as a change project.

Think before you leap
EDRM projects are frightening. They are amongst the most difficult projects you could ever undertake, because of:

• the sheer size of them
• the huge impact it has on people and the way they work
• the people issues you come across all the way down the line
  

Organisations should think very hard before deciding to proceed with an EDRM implementation. Don’t just do it because you like the look of the software. Only do it if your organisation is prepared for the huge commitment required by the whole business for the programme to be successful.

The myth of the paperless office
DTI never aimed to create a ‘paperless office’. Paper is incredibly convenient in so many ways. DTI did not introduce scanning on any great scale to accompany their EDRM implementation. They found that most of the paper that came into the organisation was either :

• Subject to copyright and hence could not be scanned and shared
  Or
• of little or no long term value and hence not worth scanning

Benefits
The project team focused strongly on the benefits that DTI would derive from the system. But the business did not realise how much effort, thought and energy people across DTI would have to put in for those benefits to be delivered.

The roll out of DTI’s ERM system (Matrix) ceased in 2003, but even now, three years on, DTI still has a change panel. The panel consists of a senior management person from each directorate who is responsible for driving up the intelligent use of the ERM system.

It is important when discussing benefits and promoting the benefits that ERM has delivered that you capture real stories from real people.

ERM and other document storage areas

DTI chose not to block off other storage areas available to people (shared drives, personal drives etc). We thought we would have to trust people and treat people like adults. People are ingenious and if they want to find alternative places to store documents they will (and these places might cause even more problems).

# posted by James @ 9:34 AM