20230816 6 Most Common Mistakes in Records Modernization.pptx
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This webinar, delivered on August 16, 2023, was a conversation between me and John Mancini on the 6 most common mistakes in records modernization.
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20230816 6 Most Common Mistakes in Records Modernization.pptx
- 1. The 6 Most Common Mistakes in Creating a Records Modernization Strategy Jesse Wilkins President Athro Consulting August 16, 2023
- 2. Agenda • If You Don’t Know Where You Are… • Budget? What Budget? • If It Ain’t Broke… • There’s No Such Thing as a Magic Wand • Perfection is the Enemy of Good (Enough) • Different Problems Require Different Solutions
- 3. If You Don’t Know Where You Are…
- 5. If It Ain’t Broke….
- 6. There’s No Such Thing as a Magic Wand
- 8. One Size Does Not Fit All
- 10. For More Information Jesse Wilkins, CIPP/US, CIPM, IGP, CRM/CIGO President, Athro Consulting https://www.athroconsulting.com jesse.wilkins@athroconsulting.com Twitter: @jessewilkins LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewilkins
Editor's Notes
- The first major issue is that many records modernization programs don’t know where to start – and in many cases that’s because they don’t know where they are in the modernization journey. In other words, it’s like Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” So, records managers need to assess the state of the program – i.e., where you are. For the Federal staff on the call, you’re lucky – NARA has an annual self-assessment you should already be filling out. For others, your state records authority may have something along those lines; and ARMA has the Information Governance Implementation Model, which can be used for a high-level assessment for any type of organization. And even those of you who don’t work for Federal agencies could still use the NARA self-assessment, just drop or rework the questions that are less relevant. It should go without saying, but these are only as valuable as the extent to which you’re honest in conducting them. This is not the time to test the Lake Woebegon effect and declare your program to be superlative in every respect. (Unless, of course, it is.) But for the rest of us, whether it’s because you don’t want to, or because you don’t think you can do so politically or culturally, you can’t fix what you don’t identify and diagnose. (DODOIG story with no names)
- The next issue we often see is that there is no budget for the types of projects and activities needed to modernize your program. It’s not always that there’s no budget to be found; rather, records modernization isn’t a priority because we haven’t made an effective business case for it. Part of the reason for that is that we tend to think about records in terms of compliance: we have to comply with legal and regulatory requirements, Freedom of Information or other open records act-type requirements if you’re in government, etc. And we do have to do that. But that’s not a story that warms the cockles of the CEO’s or agency head’s heart. Instead, we need to make the business case based on what records can do to support successful business outcomes. Efficiency. Doing less with more. Keeping your organization off the front page of the paper. Things the CEO or agency head care about. It’s also important to ensure that your business case addresses both the hard costs of the processes and technologies required for an effective program as well as the soft costs – the staff to run them, the staff or external resources to train people on them, etc. I have a client right now that is considering moving all of their information – records and non-records alike – into SharePoint. In fact, they’ve already bought millions of dollars of M365 licenses. Now, SharePoint would meet their needs – even their records management needs. They are not highly regulated, they do business exclusively in the US, etc. But they don’t have the right mix of staff to be able to support SharePoint and M365 internally, so they’ll have to spend extra money for a managed service provider to do so. At the same time, they have pockets of people for whom the use of a file share is pretty much mandatory because of some nuances in their process automation that they haven’t had time to address. And they are moving everything into the cloud and completely shutting down their data center. So, the thought was to just “lift and shift” everything into SharePoint. When we questioned IT about the wisdom of doing that, given the automation issues, they argued that it would be too high a licensing cost to move the file shares into Azure cloud-based file shares. The cost? $110 a year. The client is a multi-billion-dollar company. To recap: They are reluctant to spend $110 to keep their users productive in the short- to medium-term, and they had no qualms spending millions on M365 that they can’t support.
- The next issue is a little more subtle. We records managers have spent a lot of time and energy getting to where we are in our careers. We’ve learned the “right way” to do things. Some of us have said things like, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But in 2023, that often ends up sounding like “I don’t want to change because that’s the way we’ve always done it and I’m more comfortable doing it this way.” And in too many cases, it ends up sounding like, “If I can just push the problem out until I retire, it becomes someone else’s problem.” Here’s an example that I hope isn’t super controversial. Capstone. Most of you are probably familiar with this, and it’s not something exclusive to government or Federal government – I first ran into it in the mid-2000s with a Fortune 200 firm, though it wasn’t called that. If you’re not, the idea is that emails can have important information in them that needs to be managed effectively, but the volume, granularity, and velocity of email is such that nobody can keep up with it. If we were in person, I’d ask for a show of hands, but since we’re not, I’ll just throw out the rhetorical question: How many of you are confident that you’re managing your email, including email records, appropriately? Now, how many of your senior management, agency heads, etc. are? Exactly. Enter Capstone, which takes a role-based approach to managing email information. To oversimplify, you capture everything that goes into and out of your Capstone employees’ email: agency heads, senior leadership, *their chiefs of staff and executive assistants*, people making decisions or setting strategy. Maybe you let them cull personal or non-business-related emails, maybe you don’t. Then the emails are retained for a period of time, and in the Federal government, maybe permanently. Capstone is not records management – at least not as most of us were trained on it, with appraisal based on content and context. But NARA believes that it is the best, or at least the least worst, approach to ensuring that important emails are captured and preserved appropriately. And there are some issues, and this isn’t a Capstone presentation, but at least some of the pushback is that this “ain’t records management”. If you did the assessment we talked about earlier, and you did it honestly, you’ll probably have found a number of things that could use some love and attention.
- Some of you may have gone to the NAGARA conference, or the MER conference, or the AIIM conference earlier this year, or you may be thinking about going to the InfoGov World conference or the ARMA conference in October. I love going to conferences, and one of the reasons I go is to stay abreast of what the vendors are doing, where the industry is headed, what the latest buzzwords are and what they mean to me and to my clients. And I regularly coordinate with my clients who are going to an event to guide them as they look at and compare the solutions on offer. But what I see all too often is that a very good sales person will do a very good demo, and the client immediately catches a case of “If we had that it would solve all of our problems.” Here’s the dirty secret we either don’t know or tend to gloss over. Most technology implementations fail, and the reason they fail has almost nothing to do with what capabilities they provide. Rather, it’s the hard stuff that we tend to group under soft skills: Lack of effective planning Lack of stakeholder buy-in and support Lack of engagement with the users who will actually use the system Lack of training the users who will actually use the system And so on. In other words, the best, most amazeballs, solutions according to Gartner/Forrester/IDC/insert analyst firm here rankings cannot overcome lack of interest, lack of faith, and lack of engagement. For those of you in Federal government, here’s another example: FADGI-3. Supposed to ensure quality digital images from scanned paper documents. But if your scanner operator isn’t trained, isn’t motivated, or isn’t paying attention, a mighty FADGI-3 or even 4 scanner may not give you what you need. It’s about the strategy, the process, and understanding the outcome, and not about the latest shiny thing.
- I think many of us in records management tend to want to do the right thing, and generally for the right reason. We understand that things get broken, and we want to fix them. However, I think many of us also have a little perfectionist in us, which can manifest in ways that prevent us from being successful. We try to fix everything, all at once, as soon as possible, and when that’s patently impossible, sometimes we give up and wait for that elusive retirement + 1 date. The old saw about “crawl before you try to fly” applies. What can you do that will make the most difference or move the program forward the furthest? Do that. Leave everything else. Start with the assessment we talked about earlier, and use it to build a road map with priorities identified based on urgency, access to resources, etc. Make the connection between those projects and the underlying business of the business or the mission or vision of the organization. Be realistic about the resources you have, the budget you have, and the timeframe you’re working with, and make improvements as those allow. Don’t make perfection the enemy of progress – gradual improvement is more likely to get support and more likely to stick.
- Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that one size does not fit all. Every organization is unique in terms of its mission, its culture, its people, and its maturity level. Some organizations have world-class records programs and just need to maintain them. Others are still fighting the paper records wars and are so busy fighting the alligators that they don’t have time to drain the swamp. Similarly, different problems are different. There’s a world of difference between the recordkeeping realities of managing paper and the realities of dealing with Microsoft Teams, email, and meeting recordings. We as records managers can modernize our programs, but we can’t do it all at once. We can’t do it by ourselves. And we can’t just throw money at technology. We have to develop strategies that take into account our unique legal and operating environments, our specific challenges, and even our organizational cultures.