40 years ago, as a six year old, I watched television broadcasts that showed a riot on Chicago's streets, not far from where President-elect Obama spoke this evening. The young people fighting in the streets chanted, "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!" That came at the culmination of what was, perhaps, one of the worst years in American history. My young mind could not comprehend much of what was happening that year. Assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, riots across the country, antiwar protests. My parents steered me away from much of that history. But we had the TV on that night as protesters and police fought on the streets of Chicago -- on Balbo, on Michigan Ave. and into Grant Park. As I watched the news coverage this evening, I kept thinking about that night in 1968. Live television brought those events into so many homes in America and around the world. The whole world could experience that event of violence in real time. Part of me worried about this night's event on those same streets. Part of me considered the magnitude of the history unfolding this evening. It was wonder, and hope, and fear.
Tonight, I watched an extraordinary event, perhaps nearly unthinkable in 1968. A crowd of hundreds of thousands gathered again in Chicago. The crossed Michigan Ave. and walked down Balbo. They entered Grant Park. They celebrated the election of a new President. They celebrated the peaceful transition of power in the country. They celebrated change ordained by the people, through the power of the ballot.
That's what I take away tonight, with tears in my eyes. I can't fully explain the emotion. Perhaps it is the power of the man's oration. Perhaps it is the emotion of so many people witnessing what they never thought possible.
Pictures that I take away tonight... the full and honest emotion on the face of Jesse Jackson. I know he was thinking about an April day 40 years ago and the message of hope that seemed to be extinguished that awful day... the determination and gravity in the face and voice of the President-elect, perhaps fully understanding that sometimes you do have to be careful about what you wish for... and only now realizing that the real task of governing lies ahead, beyond the rhetoric and the conflict of the campaign.
I wish President-elect Obama only the best. I hope that he can push forward his vision for this country and that he can heal our wounds and bring us together as a truly United States. The task is monumental. And I am certain that he was hearing the echoes of 40 years ago -- the cries of, "The whole world is watching!" They are. We are. And he is the focal point. God speed, Mr. President-elect.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
ATR: "Take the Hill!"
A bit earlier today, I was feeling somewhat like ARMA's version of "Joe the Plumber". Seems that ARMA President John Frost mentioned my name in connection with the title of this post during his keynote. John snagged that little soundbite and I guess I'll have to start using it as my trademark...
So here's the back story... John and I had dinner a few weeks ago just outside Chicago. We were talking about lots of things and I mentioned to John that I felt that I really had begin to understand what sorts of qualities leadership really embodied. The case in point was understanding how a soldier can leap out of a foxhole, run into machine gun fire, and attempt to take an enemy position all on command of his superior. Now we know that the business world is not completely analogous to warfare, but there are some parallels. What I said to John was that when you absolutely believe that you are doing not only the right thing, but something that is important; when you trust that superior absolutely; when you know that he (or she) is going to be right there alongside you; you will take the hill. And in the business world, you might ask your boss how many casualties are to be incurred and when the hill is to be delivered. The key elements, however, are absolute trust and and knowing that your boss isn't going to leave you exposed. When you have that kind of support, anything is possible.
Coupled with leadership is boldness, confidence, and a sense that what you're doing is meaningful and the right thing to do. What is also clear is that you need a well-defined goal that you don't have to describe in excruciating detail. "Take the hill" means that you have a shared sense of goal and that everyone understands how that is to happen, without a detailed order describing who has to do what. Everyone already knows what they need to do. The mission is clear. Underlying that is an intense system of defining roles and scope of activities and getting everyone to understand what needs to happen when you move out.
When you are trying to get good records management moving forward in your organization, you need to ensure that everyone knows what they need to do. You have to set a clear vision of the goal. You have to make sure that everyone trusts that what you're doing is the right thing. Only then can you take the hill.
So here's the back story... John and I had dinner a few weeks ago just outside Chicago. We were talking about lots of things and I mentioned to John that I felt that I really had begin to understand what sorts of qualities leadership really embodied. The case in point was understanding how a soldier can leap out of a foxhole, run into machine gun fire, and attempt to take an enemy position all on command of his superior. Now we know that the business world is not completely analogous to warfare, but there are some parallels. What I said to John was that when you absolutely believe that you are doing not only the right thing, but something that is important; when you trust that superior absolutely; when you know that he (or she) is going to be right there alongside you; you will take the hill. And in the business world, you might ask your boss how many casualties are to be incurred and when the hill is to be delivered. The key elements, however, are absolute trust and and knowing that your boss isn't going to leave you exposed. When you have that kind of support, anything is possible.
Coupled with leadership is boldness, confidence, and a sense that what you're doing is meaningful and the right thing to do. What is also clear is that you need a well-defined goal that you don't have to describe in excruciating detail. "Take the hill" means that you have a shared sense of goal and that everyone understands how that is to happen, without a detailed order describing who has to do what. Everyone already knows what they need to do. The mission is clear. Underlying that is an intense system of defining roles and scope of activities and getting everyone to understand what needs to happen when you move out.
When you are trying to get good records management moving forward in your organization, you need to ensure that everyone knows what they need to do. You have to set a clear vision of the goal. You have to make sure that everyone trusts that what you're doing is the right thing. Only then can you take the hill.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
ATR: Email is to the 21st Century as Toxic Waste was to the 20th Century
Well now, there's something to get your brain churning. Last week I was at an e-discovery forum and one of the speakers (who was quoting someone else -- I must have had my thoughts on the latest message on my Motorola Q) made that observation. I've probably butchered it, but the point is the same.
So if you think about how some companies handled toxic waster last century, you know that many just dumped it wherever. It went into the ground, it went into the water, it went into landfills. No one cared. There was no real regulation and no real penalty for not taking care of it. The stuff just seemed to accumulate faster and faster. It was expensive to deal with and you couldn't store it forever. And doggone it, it was hard to reduce and make safe.
Fast forward. Email. Sound familiar?
Toxic waste continued to accumulate until people got sick and the plaintiffs' lawyers realized that they had the makings of a bonanza. Then the government got involved. It made some hard rules, forced companies to clean up their mess (and fined them for good measure), and made sure that it didn't happen again. And companies tried to fix things. They went looking for their messes. They fought over who was responsible for cleaning something up. They paid the fines. And some companies went out of business. But most of the problem eventually got solved and most of the toxic waste issues have been dealt with. But then not every company created toxic waste.
On the other hand, we have email. Every company has it. And very few manage it well. So now you have piles and piles of electronic waste all over the enterprise. People stumble on disks in closets. Someone leaves and a manager has thousands of emails to review. People mix business with personal correspondence. Business correspondence takes place outside the enterprise. The stuff is accumulated at nearly vertical rates. And the lawyers are circling. The court system in the United States is starting to take notice. Rules have been written that require companies to be forthcoming about where their stuff is. Some companies have been punished for not producing what they had. And the cost of find and produce this stuff keeps growing.
Now enter greater concerns about privacy. Here's a very similar line of thinking from Cory Doctorow:
"Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste -- We should treat personal electronic data with the same care and respect as weapons-grade plutonium - it is dangerous, long-lasting and once it has leaked there's no getting it back." (Posted in The Guardian.)
One of these days we're going to need a Superfund for all those emails...
So if you think about how some companies handled toxic waster last century, you know that many just dumped it wherever. It went into the ground, it went into the water, it went into landfills. No one cared. There was no real regulation and no real penalty for not taking care of it. The stuff just seemed to accumulate faster and faster. It was expensive to deal with and you couldn't store it forever. And doggone it, it was hard to reduce and make safe.
Fast forward. Email. Sound familiar?
Toxic waste continued to accumulate until people got sick and the plaintiffs' lawyers realized that they had the makings of a bonanza. Then the government got involved. It made some hard rules, forced companies to clean up their mess (and fined them for good measure), and made sure that it didn't happen again. And companies tried to fix things. They went looking for their messes. They fought over who was responsible for cleaning something up. They paid the fines. And some companies went out of business. But most of the problem eventually got solved and most of the toxic waste issues have been dealt with. But then not every company created toxic waste.
On the other hand, we have email. Every company has it. And very few manage it well. So now you have piles and piles of electronic waste all over the enterprise. People stumble on disks in closets. Someone leaves and a manager has thousands of emails to review. People mix business with personal correspondence. Business correspondence takes place outside the enterprise. The stuff is accumulated at nearly vertical rates. And the lawyers are circling. The court system in the United States is starting to take notice. Rules have been written that require companies to be forthcoming about where their stuff is. Some companies have been punished for not producing what they had. And the cost of find and produce this stuff keeps growing.
Now enter greater concerns about privacy. Here's a very similar line of thinking from Cory Doctorow:
"Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste -- We should treat personal electronic data with the same care and respect as weapons-grade plutonium - it is dangerous, long-lasting and once it has leaked there's no getting it back." (Posted in The Guardian.)
One of these days we're going to need a Superfund for all those emails...
ATR: The Bucket List
Over on the Records Management Listserv, there is a small battle raging. Now in the past, I'd jump in and hammer out a long-winded posting that would drive a whole lot of people batty. So now that I have my blog, well, you'll find something a bit more reasonable to read.
The elder statesman of the profession, Bill Benedon, FAI, CRM got things started earlier this afternoon with this:
"Appears the rush is on to take over the scheduling process with buckets. A few very interesting articles have appeared pushing this concept. I know what it is all about and I'm agin it. But I would like to see a RIM definition of bucket(s). Buckets come in all sizes as we know and at times they can overflow. So you buget-teers out there. Since this is now part of the RIM literature, let's hear a definition. Is this really new or just and expansion of the "series concept" or the "functional" approach to scheduling."
Now no one who has had a run in with Bill will ever confuse him for the kindly grandfatherly type when they have been at odds with him. I say that with all due respect and I know that challenging Bill means that you better be on your "A game". It's ultimately a good thing. So for much of the late afternoon and early evening, while I was still slaving away at the Day Job, a small battle was going on. It was just a small battle, but it was late in the day, so I suspect that the battle will be joined again in the morning.
Bill's original post points out the three major approaches to records retention schedules. Once upon a time, every retention schedule was based upon the record series. This approach goes back to the foundations of records management in the archives field, where description of records down to the document level have often been commonplace. record series are extraordinarily granular and are typically created at the department level of an organization. They can be hundreds or thousands of lines long. They are obsolete as soon as the next organizational change takes place or whenever some new type of record is created. But, in a manual system of paper records, they are an effective way to find a particular record. Unfortunately, they are a bear to keep consistent and expensive to maintain over time.
At the other end of the spectrum, are the "big buckets" that likely prompted Bill's original post. This approach tends to be more in vogue with people who never have to try and find anything or who have never sweated over some legalese to try and determine the proper retention period for something. This approach effectively works from the standpoint that there are only a handful of frequently used retention periods. Records are tossed into a bucket that corresponds to the length of time that the record should be kept. This keeps maintenance to a minimum because no one really ever has to change anything. People will be able to determine how long something needs to be kept. In theory, that could make sense. Problem is, no one really knows. Absent a control to the contrary, most people will keep everything for as long as they can. The others will toss everything as soon as they can. A few in the middle will figure out what is correct. The buckets will also tend to make it very difficult to accurately find anything.
In the middle are functional schedules. An organization is distilled down to the core functions that it performs. Accounting / Finance, HR and Benefits, Real Estate and Facilities, Administration, Law, Manufacturing, R&D, Health & Safety, and so on. These functions avoid matching the business units of the company one for one. In other words, if a company has a consumer division and a business to business division, it really shouldn't matter what is being manufactured or sold at a broad level. The variable here, however, would be in heavily regulated industries where there is likely a significant difference in retention periods for products in the regulated industry and those in an unregulated industry. The benefit to the functional schedule is that it allows the organization to expand and contract without having to perform massive revisions of the retention schedule. The downside is that it still allows a certain amount of choice by the end user and poorly described records are still subject to loss. But the trend seems to be for most organizations to move towards the functional schedule and simplify their retention schedules.
The question is whether or not the end users are in a place to accurately select the right line item and consistently describe the records.
The archivist in me pines for the old days when we had these great detailed lists of records. every department had a nicely customized retention schedule that described just the records in that department. when you wanted a paid invoice, you knew you could search for "Paid Invoices" and the right invoice would be found in a box very quickly. Under the functional schedule, those paid invoices will be in the "Accounting" line item and you have to hope that the person sending the records offsite took the time to indicate that the records were paid invoices from a particular year and organized in a particular way.
But at the same time, if we have any hope of getting our electronic records under control, we have to make things easier for the end user. They are not going to drill down through hundreds of departments and tens of line items to find the particular thing assigned to their department. If the end user can't click through the proper identifiers in a couple of seconds, it just won't happen.
The elder statesman of the profession, Bill Benedon, FAI, CRM got things started earlier this afternoon with this:
"Appears the rush is on to take over the scheduling process with buckets. A few very interesting articles have appeared pushing this concept. I know what it is all about and I'm agin it. But I would like to see a RIM definition of bucket(s). Buckets come in all sizes as we know and at times they can overflow. So you buget-teers out there. Since this is now part of the RIM literature, let's hear a definition. Is this really new or just and expansion of the "series concept" or the "functional" approach to scheduling."
Now no one who has had a run in with Bill will ever confuse him for the kindly grandfatherly type when they have been at odds with him. I say that with all due respect and I know that challenging Bill means that you better be on your "A game". It's ultimately a good thing. So for much of the late afternoon and early evening, while I was still slaving away at the Day Job, a small battle was going on. It was just a small battle, but it was late in the day, so I suspect that the battle will be joined again in the morning.
Bill's original post points out the three major approaches to records retention schedules. Once upon a time, every retention schedule was based upon the record series. This approach goes back to the foundations of records management in the archives field, where description of records down to the document level have often been commonplace. record series are extraordinarily granular and are typically created at the department level of an organization. They can be hundreds or thousands of lines long. They are obsolete as soon as the next organizational change takes place or whenever some new type of record is created. But, in a manual system of paper records, they are an effective way to find a particular record. Unfortunately, they are a bear to keep consistent and expensive to maintain over time.
At the other end of the spectrum, are the "big buckets" that likely prompted Bill's original post. This approach tends to be more in vogue with people who never have to try and find anything or who have never sweated over some legalese to try and determine the proper retention period for something. This approach effectively works from the standpoint that there are only a handful of frequently used retention periods. Records are tossed into a bucket that corresponds to the length of time that the record should be kept. This keeps maintenance to a minimum because no one really ever has to change anything. People will be able to determine how long something needs to be kept. In theory, that could make sense. Problem is, no one really knows. Absent a control to the contrary, most people will keep everything for as long as they can. The others will toss everything as soon as they can. A few in the middle will figure out what is correct. The buckets will also tend to make it very difficult to accurately find anything.
In the middle are functional schedules. An organization is distilled down to the core functions that it performs. Accounting / Finance, HR and Benefits, Real Estate and Facilities, Administration, Law, Manufacturing, R&D, Health & Safety, and so on. These functions avoid matching the business units of the company one for one. In other words, if a company has a consumer division and a business to business division, it really shouldn't matter what is being manufactured or sold at a broad level. The variable here, however, would be in heavily regulated industries where there is likely a significant difference in retention periods for products in the regulated industry and those in an unregulated industry. The benefit to the functional schedule is that it allows the organization to expand and contract without having to perform massive revisions of the retention schedule. The downside is that it still allows a certain amount of choice by the end user and poorly described records are still subject to loss. But the trend seems to be for most organizations to move towards the functional schedule and simplify their retention schedules.
The question is whether or not the end users are in a place to accurately select the right line item and consistently describe the records.
The archivist in me pines for the old days when we had these great detailed lists of records. every department had a nicely customized retention schedule that described just the records in that department. when you wanted a paid invoice, you knew you could search for "Paid Invoices" and the right invoice would be found in a box very quickly. Under the functional schedule, those paid invoices will be in the "Accounting" line item and you have to hope that the person sending the records offsite took the time to indicate that the records were paid invoices from a particular year and organized in a particular way.
But at the same time, if we have any hope of getting our electronic records under control, we have to make things easier for the end user. They are not going to drill down through hundreds of departments and tens of line items to find the particular thing assigned to their department. If the end user can't click through the proper identifiers in a couple of seconds, it just won't happen.
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