This is a record

About this blog

2006-03-22T06:52:00.000Z

We are planning to set up a blog for the RMS London Group.

This is a test blog.

Our home page is http://www.rms-gb.org.uk/sigs/london

Neil Lang's talk on ERM to the 8 March RMS London Group meeting

2006-03-16T16:53:00.000Z

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.

Marc Fresko's talk on ERM to the 8 March RMS London Group meeting

2006-03-16T16:18:00.000Z

These are notes I took whilst listening to Marc tell us of his learnings from his involvement as a consultant in many ERM projects in Central Government. Marc works for Cornwell Management Consultants

The current state of play

Some Government Departments have completed their ERM roll outs
Some are making progress
Some are stuck in a perpetual pilot phase
Some projects have been cancelled

ERM technology works. But the projects face big issues with people, and usage rates are generally lower than hoped. Across the board EDRM can’t be said to be an unqualified success, and is not universally popular with users. However no-one has yet come up with a better way to tackling the potential chaos of electronic documentation in organisations.

Lessons learned
Where projects have failed, the key reasons for the failure are:

Complexity of the projects: organisations often don’t realise just how complex these projects are: not just the technology, but the huge people issues
Lack of commitment: the success of the project depends upon a huge level of commitment from senior managers down
Insufficient resources: organisations cutting corners and not putting in the time and resources to do the implementation properly

The early government implementers have had to contend with the added challenge that for many projects it was the ‘first time through’ for software suppliers. The experience that suppliers have gained from central government means that this should no longer be an issue.

UK leading the world
The UK are seen by the rest of the word as being leaders in the field of electronic records management. If you type the phrase ‘electronic records management’ into Google the first hit that comes up is The UK National Archives site.

The arguments people use against ERM
There are four main arguments you will hear from people sceptical of the value of an ERM project:

Give up it won’t work!
Give up: lets get in a powerful search engine
Give up: lets get collaboration software instead

Stuart Orr’s talk on ERM to the 8 March RMS London Group meeting

2006-03-16T09:34:00.000Z

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).

London: records management capital of the world?

2006-03-11T21:33:00.000Z

I can't think of any other city in the world with such a span and concentration of records management expertise.

The first major implementations of electronic records management systems took place in Whitehall, we have a centre of expertise at the National Archives in Kew and we have records managers in most sectors of the economy from Hospitals to Investment Banks.

You can find them all in our city, and you can meet them if you come to an RMS London Group meeting (the next one is 14 June 2006).