I had the good fortune and opportunity to attend the SAA (Society of American Archivists) Business Archives Colloquium that was hosted by Motorola and McDonald's today.
I had the opportunity to chat with a number of archivists and they had a lot to say about records managers. At one point, I commented to Motorola's Archivist, "I thought I was going to a SAA meeting, but it looks like an ARMA meeting has broken out."
By and large, I found that many archivists "get" records management. They see the fit between our two professions and they see the synergies that come about when the professionals talk and work together. In some cases, the archivist also manages records management or ends up being the de facto records manager. At the core of it, we can strengthen an archival collection. We have the "stuff" that they collect. We also often have it already described and categorized in a recognizable manner that makes their appraisal process run more smoothly.
But sometimes records managers get in the way. We're still seen, in some cases, as Conan the Shredder, with no regard for history or long term value of records. One archivist mentioned that his records managers made him destroy sections of company publications that "had no archival value". That means that he has a pile of publications lacking articles or pages. Another archivist bemoaned the lack of training that a recent "records manager" that came to her company had. She spent three months trying to train someone that had no background in records management and pleaded with him to go to ARMA meetings to get some training. This same "records manager" barely had a high school diploma and had previous job experience in retail. He happened to ride the train with his new boss. Yet another archivist described the series of "bungee" records managers that she has had to deal with. They are managers in holding patterns who are assigned to records until something else comes up for them. Once again, this archivist points them (usually unsuccessfully) to ARMA and spends a lot of time giving them basic records management training.
In general, what I heard is that many records managers fail to even make the attempt to talk to the archivist. And many of those that do, stay overly focused on blind obedience to perceived notions of absolute disposition (i.e. destruction) of records at the end of a retention period.
Where there is a successful co-mingling of programs, the following characteristics are mentioned:
1) The records management policy addresses transfer of records to the Archives.
2) Retention schedules call for "archival review" of select record series.
3) The archivist has input into how record series are described and named.
4) The archivist is a part of the records management governance structure.
5) The archivist is part of the destruction review process.
I also heard some things today that quite surprised me. Business archivists sometimes scoff at their colleagues in non-business archives. Business archivists deal with the very same realities of corporate management that we do, fighting for resources and untangling merger, acquisition, and divestiture records. They are often "gifted" with records "stuff" and generally don't subscribe to every dotted "I" and crossed "T" that some of their colleagues feel are important. They make spot appraisal decisions and make hard decisions to de-accession records that have less value than originally thought. They are very much focused on adding value to their companies and getting out of the "curiosity shop" business.
ARMA and SAA do work together, but clearly we need to do more. There are a number of opportunities for our organizations and professionals to collaborate:
1) Records managers need to hear from business archivists at ARMA educational sessions and learn basic appraisal.
2) Archivists and Records Managers need to work together to develop appropriate policies to ensure that records can be retained in corporate archives without running afoul of spoliation or "selective destruction" charges in litigation. Further, we need to educate legal professionals on preservation of historically significant records.
3) Archivists need resources to turn to when they have to deal with records management issues.
A long time ago, a very wise archivist pounded into my head that "archives and records management are two sides of the same coin". I have never forgotten that. I had academic training in archives as well as records management when I began working 22 years ago. That first job was at the Illinois State Archives as an Archival Intern. Had a position opened up in the Archives Section, rather than the Records Management Section, I might have ended up as an archivist, rather than a records manager. I joke to archivists that "records management pays better" (it's generally -- and very unfortunately -- true). Like some records managers, archivists are passionate about their work. Most of them don't dream of running a records management program -- they have no desire to be immersed in our world. I commented to one archivist that she should be running records management as well as archives in her company and she rolled her eyes. She finds our world too complex and we wear entirely too many hats. She felt that she could never grasp all the issues we deal with. I think that was a compliment.
Those folks in your corporate archives aren't a threat; they are allies. Spend some time with them and learn how you can work together. We're all records professionals.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
Technological Pack Mules and Pack Rats – Eleven Years Later
About 11 years ago, I wrote this article. I then followed it up in 2001. I’d like to reflect on some of the things that I wrote back then with some new thoughts. My 2001 comments are in BOLD text. My current comments are in BOLD text and prefaced with "2007:"
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I noticed a strange thing the other day when I was putting on a shirt. It seemed like my right arm was longer than my left (or the cleaners had managed to shrink half of my shirt). It dawned on me how this could happen: lugging my “office”, a laptop computer, to and from home each day. Later, as I stood on the train station platform, I watched a parade of commuters pass by, many of whom were also lugging their “offices” with them. It occurred to me that perhaps shirt manufacturers should take notice...
I’m having the same problem now with the front of my shirts…
2007: The more things change... the more they remain the same...
This month’s column is not intended to be a neo-Luddite (yes, I had to look that one up too) treatise on how technology is ruining our lives. Rather, I’d like to reflect on how technology has changed how people work and how information is managed. This technological revolution of the past ten or so years has far-ranging implications about how we do our jobs and how we will manage the information of the future.
Okay, that “Luddite” term was pretty avant garde when I wrote this…
2007: Yep, still out there, although the usage of the term seems to have died in the past few years. I guess people are just used to all this technology stuff.
As for me, I've given up on the shoulder bags... my hip was beginning to bother me, so now I have a backpack. And now I take it for granted that I will bring my office home every night. I have high speed Internet at home and I can work 24 by 7 if I so desire.
My first “home computer” was a 40 pound “luggable” Kaypro computer back in 1985. That antique, which happened to be built like a tank, ran the CP/M operating system, had 64 kb of RAM, two 360 kb floppy drives, and no hard drive. I learned the WordStar word processing software on that machine and opened my eyes to a whole new world of technology. I wrote papers for graduate school on that machine, built rudimentary spreadsheets with it, and learned a little bit about databases. Today, I have a 5 pound Compaq laptop with 48 mb of RAM, a 2 gb hard drive, a 256 color screen, a modem, and enough software to keep me on the low end of the learning curve for the next 10 years. For all the advances that have been made in the 11 years that I have been using personal computers, this column could have been written just as easily on that old Kaypro. Many will also argue that this column could have been written with an Underwood manual typewriter, a sharp pencil, or a stick and soft clay tablets.
My current arm-stretching laptop weighs about the same, but boasts 128MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive and a processor running at 600mhz. It also has a 15-inch screen, a DVD drive and a network card -- and is able to outpace my current desktop. And I’m still learning how to use everything.
2007: The current laptop is running at 1.83ghz, has 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. And we expect it to have not only the DVD drive, but it can also burn CDs. And it is lighter by about half than the last laptop I had.
Back to the central theme, it occurs to me that each day when I pack up my laptop, I am taking home literally megabytes of company information. Hundreds of files, proposals, presentations, e-mail, etc. are locked inside my laptop. The weight that stretches my arm is the hardware alone, but well could be the thousands of pages of information in the computer. Imagine this: let’s say that I have 200 megabytes of actual information in my laptop. Now let’s suppose that every page of word processing text in my laptop occupies about 5 kilobytes. That means that the 200 megabytes would be equivalent to nearly 40,000 pages of printed text. My rule of thumb is 2000 sheets of paper per cubic foot, so I’m walking home with 20 cubic feet of information every night! No wonder my arm is getting longer! The reality is that I don’t have 40,000 pages of text in my laptop. Many of the files are quite large because they contain graphics or are in special formats. Nevertheless, there is a LOT of information in my laptop.
And now it seems that no matter how big my hard drive is, I manage to fill it up. I recently purchased a new technology toy -- a “Zip” drive -- essentially a big floppy disk that holds 100 megabytes of information on each removable disk. I bought 10 disks, a GIGABYTE! After backing up my laptop and moving some information to the Zip disks, I had two blank Zip disks left and barely 150 megabytes free on my laptop. I looked at myself in the mirror and admitted that I am a technological pack rat. As I wedged the Zip drive, power supply, extra disks, and cables into my laptop bag, it occurred to me that my arm would be stretched a little longer by the new weight and that I would continue to be a technological pack mule as well.
And now I’m burning CD-ROMs at home for backup. Each of those disks holds 650MB of data. And this capability is starting to show up in office desktop PCs. So I don’t have as much gear to lug around to access information, but I’m able to carry a lot more information with me.
2007: I can burn DVDs now. And I walk around with several gigabytes of storage on thumb drives. Heck, my new cell phone has a 2GB memory card inside. The amount of data that we carry is expanding exponentially. The weight of that data is being reduced almost exponentially. Thumb drives take up very little space and can hold more than several DVD disks. I don't need a separate drive house and power supply.
In some respects, the "Pack Mule" aspect of this technological change is on the way out -- but we always manage to find some new gadget to pack in the bag and haul around.
And so, 690 words into this column (now there’s something WordStar couldn’t do!), I turn to the records management considerations. First, more and more information is being created and retained electronically. While a lot of the space on hard drives is consumed by bigger and bigger application programs, people are finding that retaining documents, reports, spreadsheets, etc. in electronic form enables them to rapidly recycle pieces of the information for future use, or search and find information more rapidly than if the information was retained only on paper.
That information is also going home with employees more often. If you’ve seen the video “Buried Alive”, you might recall “Charlie’s garage”, where a retired employee had put boxes of company information because he couldn’t bear to see it all turned into “confetti”. Charlie’s garage is in the boxes of floppy disks, home PC hard drives, Bernoulli disks, backup tapes, and now, Zip disks, that can be found in any home office. And the information on that media will be much easier to locate that the papers in Charlie’s boxes.
And don’t forget those CD-ROM disks. Plus, so much more is being done via email these days, so people are often taking almost all of their work home with them.
2007: Still true and getting worse. Add in high speed Internet connections available to most Americans (DSL or cable) and tremendous amounts of data are moving from the workplace to home. And there are many more places to store that data -- not only physically, but virtually on the Internet. So "Charlie's garage" exists not only in Charlie's house and in his briefbag, but also in a hundred places on the Internet.
As a records manager, you need to understand that this is occurring in your organization. The information on the hard drives of laptop computers is no different than paper information stored in boxes. It needs to be made part of the retention schedules of the organization, and employees need to be aware that they should not be retaining information longer than approved retention schedules, regardless of the physical medium of storage. At the same time, for every one of us who retains two or three backups of information, there are probably an equivalent number of others who never back up their computer. This is equally risky because computer hardware fails, and when it does, it can damage information. The challenge, then, is to encourage people to be somewhat conservative in what they retain, while ensuring that they are protecting information in the first place.
In the next couple years, you will hear the term “terabyte” more and more. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. It wasn’t that long ago that “gigabyte” was a foreign term. Now home PCs come with 2+ gigabytes of hard disk storage. After the terabyte, look for “petabytes”... The point is that storage is becoming a cheap commodity both for personal computers and for business as a whole. While application software continues to become more and more “feature rich” (i.e. “fat”), it is also the expansion of data being stored on PCs that drives the need for storage capacity. This is a direct function of the increasing utilization of PCs and servers to manage applications that were formerly run from a mini-computer or mainframe. Our challenge as records managers will be to find strategies to manage this data and ensure that no information is retained longer (or shorter) than it should be.
The company that I work for has a total email volume in the terabytes. We have associates with nearly 2GB of email stored on the server. We’re rapidly finding that maintaining all of this information is no longer “free”, but costs a lot of money to store, manage, and back up. Unfortunately, the problems of electronic data management are not as evident to people as the problems of paper management. Historically, when did records management start in organizations? Yes, when the file cabinets were full and the closets could hold no more paper. Today, employees just keep storing more and more on file servers and the problem does not become evident until the server can hold no more or until the mail system starts to crash with regularity. But most companies see this as a technology issue rather than a records management issue. For many companies, the solution to the problem is either one of “slash and burn” (i.e. delete large files and files that have not been used in some time) or buy more hardware.
2007: You can now buy terabyte hard drives for home use. And they are not expensive. But corporate storage seems to get more and more expensive. The end user doesn't understand it. They can go down to Best Buy and walk out with a 1TB hard disk drive for $400. They simply don't understand when corporate IT tells them that they can't buy them that volume of storage for anything less that hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they really don't understand when the records manager tells them that they need to manage that data and actually delete some of it now and then.
Ten years ago, personal computers were just starting to become office fixtures. It will be interesting to see if the next ten years hold as many changes in technology. What this bodes for us as records managers will be interesting as well. Looking into my crystal ball, I don’t see paper going away anytime soon. If anything, the volumes will continue to increase in the foreseeable future, simply because people are still more comfortable looking at data on a piece of paper than on a computer screen. This will change, certainly, as more and more people who have grown up with personal computers enter the workforce.
Five years later this remains true, although we’re migrating more and more to Web-based applications that use Internet browsers to access information. When I wrote this column, the Internet revolution was just getting underway. But we still generate millions of pages of documents. To use the September tragedy as a case in point, think of the pictures that you saw in the aftermath of that horror: thousands, if not millions, of sheets of paper blowing around lower Manhattan. But, I would suspect that we’re possibly coming to a peak in paper production as more applications move to the Internet and completely electronic business transactions continue to increase. Still, don’t sell your stock in those paper companies yet. People still do like to handle paper.
2007: And here, ten years later, paper is still out there -- and still growing. While I think the explosive growth of paper use is slowing (primarily due to more and more use of online forms and Internet-based systems), printers (particularly color) are getting cheaper and faster and encouraging people to print things just to toss them out in a very short time.
The pace of change seems to be slowing a bit. But we're finding new ways to put this technology to work. We're beginning to mainstream many of the technologies that we were just learning about ten years ago. Most significantly, we're compressing time and space and truly seeing how the Internet has made the world a much smaller place -- and required us to us the technology differently and more effectively. Now our records span the globe. They span corporate entities. And people are no longer tied to just one company, but often contracted out to many companies.
The message that I have been preaching for the last couple years remains the same: if you don’t have at least the most basic understanding of information technology and its applications, you will soon be as obsolete as an 8 inch floppy disk. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come to grips with personal computer hardware and software, imaging, workflow, and document management. You don’t need to know how these things work, but you do need to know when they can be used and what they can do. If you don’t, you will remain beneath the cardboard ceiling that I've written about before.
And as we move into what ARMA International is calling “Strategic Information Management”, it is even more critical to understand technology and its implications for record-keeping. You can certainly add to the list above the Internet, storage management, email, data protection laws, and information security. Our role in the changing landscape of records and information management is to be more proactive, think and act strategically for our organizations, build bridges to all parts of our businesses, and contribute, measurably, to the bottom line – and that contribution should increasingly be in terms of revenue, not just reduced cost. If we are to continue to be effective in our roles as records and information managers, we have to understand, develop strategies to manage, and explain the implications of “technological pack mules and pack rats”.
2007: Well, SIM didn't quite cut it, but the knowledge base for records managers remains the same -- and then some. Coming this fall, ARMA will publish a document that outlines and delineates competencies for records managers. for the first time, we'll really be able to point to something that defines what a records manager really needs to know -- and records managers will be able to measure their knowledge in a new and dynamic way.
Originally published in the ARMA Chicago Chapter Newsletter, September, 1996
Second version published in the ARMA Chicago Chapter Newsletter, November / December, 2001
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I noticed a strange thing the other day when I was putting on a shirt. It seemed like my right arm was longer than my left (or the cleaners had managed to shrink half of my shirt). It dawned on me how this could happen: lugging my “office”, a laptop computer, to and from home each day. Later, as I stood on the train station platform, I watched a parade of commuters pass by, many of whom were also lugging their “offices” with them. It occurred to me that perhaps shirt manufacturers should take notice...
I’m having the same problem now with the front of my shirts…
2007: The more things change... the more they remain the same...
This month’s column is not intended to be a neo-Luddite (yes, I had to look that one up too) treatise on how technology is ruining our lives. Rather, I’d like to reflect on how technology has changed how people work and how information is managed. This technological revolution of the past ten or so years has far-ranging implications about how we do our jobs and how we will manage the information of the future.
Okay, that “Luddite” term was pretty avant garde when I wrote this…
2007: Yep, still out there, although the usage of the term seems to have died in the past few years. I guess people are just used to all this technology stuff.
As for me, I've given up on the shoulder bags... my hip was beginning to bother me, so now I have a backpack. And now I take it for granted that I will bring my office home every night. I have high speed Internet at home and I can work 24 by 7 if I so desire.
My first “home computer” was a 40 pound “luggable” Kaypro computer back in 1985. That antique, which happened to be built like a tank, ran the CP/M operating system, had 64 kb of RAM, two 360 kb floppy drives, and no hard drive. I learned the WordStar word processing software on that machine and opened my eyes to a whole new world of technology. I wrote papers for graduate school on that machine, built rudimentary spreadsheets with it, and learned a little bit about databases. Today, I have a 5 pound Compaq laptop with 48 mb of RAM, a 2 gb hard drive, a 256 color screen, a modem, and enough software to keep me on the low end of the learning curve for the next 10 years. For all the advances that have been made in the 11 years that I have been using personal computers, this column could have been written just as easily on that old Kaypro. Many will also argue that this column could have been written with an Underwood manual typewriter, a sharp pencil, or a stick and soft clay tablets.
My current arm-stretching laptop weighs about the same, but boasts 128MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive and a processor running at 600mhz. It also has a 15-inch screen, a DVD drive and a network card -- and is able to outpace my current desktop. And I’m still learning how to use everything.
2007: The current laptop is running at 1.83ghz, has 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. And we expect it to have not only the DVD drive, but it can also burn CDs. And it is lighter by about half than the last laptop I had.
Back to the central theme, it occurs to me that each day when I pack up my laptop, I am taking home literally megabytes of company information. Hundreds of files, proposals, presentations, e-mail, etc. are locked inside my laptop. The weight that stretches my arm is the hardware alone, but well could be the thousands of pages of information in the computer. Imagine this: let’s say that I have 200 megabytes of actual information in my laptop. Now let’s suppose that every page of word processing text in my laptop occupies about 5 kilobytes. That means that the 200 megabytes would be equivalent to nearly 40,000 pages of printed text. My rule of thumb is 2000 sheets of paper per cubic foot, so I’m walking home with 20 cubic feet of information every night! No wonder my arm is getting longer! The reality is that I don’t have 40,000 pages of text in my laptop. Many of the files are quite large because they contain graphics or are in special formats. Nevertheless, there is a LOT of information in my laptop.
And now it seems that no matter how big my hard drive is, I manage to fill it up. I recently purchased a new technology toy -- a “Zip” drive -- essentially a big floppy disk that holds 100 megabytes of information on each removable disk. I bought 10 disks, a GIGABYTE! After backing up my laptop and moving some information to the Zip disks, I had two blank Zip disks left and barely 150 megabytes free on my laptop. I looked at myself in the mirror and admitted that I am a technological pack rat. As I wedged the Zip drive, power supply, extra disks, and cables into my laptop bag, it occurred to me that my arm would be stretched a little longer by the new weight and that I would continue to be a technological pack mule as well.
And now I’m burning CD-ROMs at home for backup. Each of those disks holds 650MB of data. And this capability is starting to show up in office desktop PCs. So I don’t have as much gear to lug around to access information, but I’m able to carry a lot more information with me.
2007: I can burn DVDs now. And I walk around with several gigabytes of storage on thumb drives. Heck, my new cell phone has a 2GB memory card inside. The amount of data that we carry is expanding exponentially. The weight of that data is being reduced almost exponentially. Thumb drives take up very little space and can hold more than several DVD disks. I don't need a separate drive house and power supply.
In some respects, the "Pack Mule" aspect of this technological change is on the way out -- but we always manage to find some new gadget to pack in the bag and haul around.
And so, 690 words into this column (now there’s something WordStar couldn’t do!), I turn to the records management considerations. First, more and more information is being created and retained electronically. While a lot of the space on hard drives is consumed by bigger and bigger application programs, people are finding that retaining documents, reports, spreadsheets, etc. in electronic form enables them to rapidly recycle pieces of the information for future use, or search and find information more rapidly than if the information was retained only on paper.
That information is also going home with employees more often. If you’ve seen the video “Buried Alive”, you might recall “Charlie’s garage”, where a retired employee had put boxes of company information because he couldn’t bear to see it all turned into “confetti”. Charlie’s garage is in the boxes of floppy disks, home PC hard drives, Bernoulli disks, backup tapes, and now, Zip disks, that can be found in any home office. And the information on that media will be much easier to locate that the papers in Charlie’s boxes.
And don’t forget those CD-ROM disks. Plus, so much more is being done via email these days, so people are often taking almost all of their work home with them.
2007: Still true and getting worse. Add in high speed Internet connections available to most Americans (DSL or cable) and tremendous amounts of data are moving from the workplace to home. And there are many more places to store that data -- not only physically, but virtually on the Internet. So "Charlie's garage" exists not only in Charlie's house and in his briefbag, but also in a hundred places on the Internet.
As a records manager, you need to understand that this is occurring in your organization. The information on the hard drives of laptop computers is no different than paper information stored in boxes. It needs to be made part of the retention schedules of the organization, and employees need to be aware that they should not be retaining information longer than approved retention schedules, regardless of the physical medium of storage. At the same time, for every one of us who retains two or three backups of information, there are probably an equivalent number of others who never back up their computer. This is equally risky because computer hardware fails, and when it does, it can damage information. The challenge, then, is to encourage people to be somewhat conservative in what they retain, while ensuring that they are protecting information in the first place.
In the next couple years, you will hear the term “terabyte” more and more. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. It wasn’t that long ago that “gigabyte” was a foreign term. Now home PCs come with 2+ gigabytes of hard disk storage. After the terabyte, look for “petabytes”... The point is that storage is becoming a cheap commodity both for personal computers and for business as a whole. While application software continues to become more and more “feature rich” (i.e. “fat”), it is also the expansion of data being stored on PCs that drives the need for storage capacity. This is a direct function of the increasing utilization of PCs and servers to manage applications that were formerly run from a mini-computer or mainframe. Our challenge as records managers will be to find strategies to manage this data and ensure that no information is retained longer (or shorter) than it should be.
The company that I work for has a total email volume in the terabytes. We have associates with nearly 2GB of email stored on the server. We’re rapidly finding that maintaining all of this information is no longer “free”, but costs a lot of money to store, manage, and back up. Unfortunately, the problems of electronic data management are not as evident to people as the problems of paper management. Historically, when did records management start in organizations? Yes, when the file cabinets were full and the closets could hold no more paper. Today, employees just keep storing more and more on file servers and the problem does not become evident until the server can hold no more or until the mail system starts to crash with regularity. But most companies see this as a technology issue rather than a records management issue. For many companies, the solution to the problem is either one of “slash and burn” (i.e. delete large files and files that have not been used in some time) or buy more hardware.
2007: You can now buy terabyte hard drives for home use. And they are not expensive. But corporate storage seems to get more and more expensive. The end user doesn't understand it. They can go down to Best Buy and walk out with a 1TB hard disk drive for $400. They simply don't understand when corporate IT tells them that they can't buy them that volume of storage for anything less that hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they really don't understand when the records manager tells them that they need to manage that data and actually delete some of it now and then.
Ten years ago, personal computers were just starting to become office fixtures. It will be interesting to see if the next ten years hold as many changes in technology. What this bodes for us as records managers will be interesting as well. Looking into my crystal ball, I don’t see paper going away anytime soon. If anything, the volumes will continue to increase in the foreseeable future, simply because people are still more comfortable looking at data on a piece of paper than on a computer screen. This will change, certainly, as more and more people who have grown up with personal computers enter the workforce.
Five years later this remains true, although we’re migrating more and more to Web-based applications that use Internet browsers to access information. When I wrote this column, the Internet revolution was just getting underway. But we still generate millions of pages of documents. To use the September tragedy as a case in point, think of the pictures that you saw in the aftermath of that horror: thousands, if not millions, of sheets of paper blowing around lower Manhattan. But, I would suspect that we’re possibly coming to a peak in paper production as more applications move to the Internet and completely electronic business transactions continue to increase. Still, don’t sell your stock in those paper companies yet. People still do like to handle paper.
2007: And here, ten years later, paper is still out there -- and still growing. While I think the explosive growth of paper use is slowing (primarily due to more and more use of online forms and Internet-based systems), printers (particularly color) are getting cheaper and faster and encouraging people to print things just to toss them out in a very short time.
The pace of change seems to be slowing a bit. But we're finding new ways to put this technology to work. We're beginning to mainstream many of the technologies that we were just learning about ten years ago. Most significantly, we're compressing time and space and truly seeing how the Internet has made the world a much smaller place -- and required us to us the technology differently and more effectively. Now our records span the globe. They span corporate entities. And people are no longer tied to just one company, but often contracted out to many companies.
The message that I have been preaching for the last couple years remains the same: if you don’t have at least the most basic understanding of information technology and its applications, you will soon be as obsolete as an 8 inch floppy disk. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come to grips with personal computer hardware and software, imaging, workflow, and document management. You don’t need to know how these things work, but you do need to know when they can be used and what they can do. If you don’t, you will remain beneath the cardboard ceiling that I've written about before.
And as we move into what ARMA International is calling “Strategic Information Management”, it is even more critical to understand technology and its implications for record-keeping. You can certainly add to the list above the Internet, storage management, email, data protection laws, and information security. Our role in the changing landscape of records and information management is to be more proactive, think and act strategically for our organizations, build bridges to all parts of our businesses, and contribute, measurably, to the bottom line – and that contribution should increasingly be in terms of revenue, not just reduced cost. If we are to continue to be effective in our roles as records and information managers, we have to understand, develop strategies to manage, and explain the implications of “technological pack mules and pack rats”.
2007: Well, SIM didn't quite cut it, but the knowledge base for records managers remains the same -- and then some. Coming this fall, ARMA will publish a document that outlines and delineates competencies for records managers. for the first time, we'll really be able to point to something that defines what a records manager really needs to know -- and records managers will be able to measure their knowledge in a new and dynamic way.
Originally published in the ARMA Chicago Chapter Newsletter, September, 1996
Second version published in the ARMA Chicago Chapter Newsletter, November / December, 2001
Are We at War with China?
I stumbled on this editorial in a list of news articles that came via a key word search that runs every day for me.
Now Johnstown, PA isn't exactly the hub of America, but this guy has said what I have been thinking for a while. With all of the ongoing problems with products made in China, I have to wonder if we are being probed for a new kind of warfare. Consider that Wal Mart's quest for low prices (see "The Wal Mart Effect") has moved a tremendous amount of American consumer product manufacturing offshore. You cannot go anywhere and buy nearly anything that hasn't been manufactured in China. The latest lead paint episode has effectively destroyed Mattel's Christmas -- if not because the products are going to be off the shelves, but because their reputation has been incredibly tarnished. It will take Mattel quite a while to overcome this -- and with profits for an entire year wiped off the books.
So think about that... in your wildest Tom Clancy scenario, imagine a country deciding to wage war economically. A few serious problems with products manufactured for American companies could put those companies out of business. I worry, frankly, about cell phones that explode or catch fire due to defective batteries. A few people seriously hurt or killed by cell phones could put my employer out of business. And what is true for Mattel or or Colgate or Motorola could be true for Black and Decker or Proctor and Gamble.
Then imagine a concerted effort to poison the food supply or cosmetics industry. Look at the results of the dog food scare. Imagine thousands of people becoming ill. Or something besides lead paint (which is bad enough) in toys.
Now look at Chinese investment in American companies. I read something this morning about a Chinese company wanting to buy Seagate. What if they embedded some code in a hard drive that "phoned home" with your personal data?
Yes, you could bring America to its knees with a well-orchestrated series of events that struck at the credibility of American companies and the safety (or security) of manufactured food and other products.
This is an effect of flattening the world. It is one of the most serious potential negative effects. But it could also simply be paranoia. I don't intend to sound like a xenophobe, but I'm wondering if our quest for low prices has swung the pendulum entirely too far.
Now Johnstown, PA isn't exactly the hub of America, but this guy has said what I have been thinking for a while. With all of the ongoing problems with products made in China, I have to wonder if we are being probed for a new kind of warfare. Consider that Wal Mart's quest for low prices (see "The Wal Mart Effect") has moved a tremendous amount of American consumer product manufacturing offshore. You cannot go anywhere and buy nearly anything that hasn't been manufactured in China. The latest lead paint episode has effectively destroyed Mattel's Christmas -- if not because the products are going to be off the shelves, but because their reputation has been incredibly tarnished. It will take Mattel quite a while to overcome this -- and with profits for an entire year wiped off the books.
So think about that... in your wildest Tom Clancy scenario, imagine a country deciding to wage war economically. A few serious problems with products manufactured for American companies could put those companies out of business. I worry, frankly, about cell phones that explode or catch fire due to defective batteries. A few people seriously hurt or killed by cell phones could put my employer out of business. And what is true for Mattel or or Colgate or Motorola could be true for Black and Decker or Proctor and Gamble.
Then imagine a concerted effort to poison the food supply or cosmetics industry. Look at the results of the dog food scare. Imagine thousands of people becoming ill. Or something besides lead paint (which is bad enough) in toys.
Now look at Chinese investment in American companies. I read something this morning about a Chinese company wanting to buy Seagate. What if they embedded some code in a hard drive that "phoned home" with your personal data?
Yes, you could bring America to its knees with a well-orchestrated series of events that struck at the credibility of American companies and the safety (or security) of manufactured food and other products.
This is an effect of flattening the world. It is one of the most serious potential negative effects. But it could also simply be paranoia. I don't intend to sound like a xenophobe, but I'm wondering if our quest for low prices has swung the pendulum entirely too far.
Dude, You're Not Gonna Get a Dell!
file this one under, "Customer Service Matters".
So the college kid in my house decided that she wasn't going to lug the desktop PC and all of its peripherals back to Northwestern this year. The Cunningham Scholarship Fund met and determined that it was willing to pony up half the cost of a laptop, with the provisions that lost, stolen or busted laptops are not replaceable except through outlay of said college kid's own money.
We had been poking around Dell kiosks for a while. I've been a Dell guy with laptops for a while, having bought an Inspiron about 8 years ago and it is still ticking (granted, rather slowly -- but it will boot and eventually get around to launching a program). I've also been through most of the D series of Latitude laptops, with fairly decent results, considering this is my everyday computer at work for the past six or so years.
So I trust Dell and they have always exceeded expectations for me. Well, until now.
On July 24, we configured and ordered an Inspiron 1520 in "Ruby Red". The estimated shipping date was August 10 and my comment to my daughter was that it would probably be at the house before August 3rd, "because they always pad the shipping date". Um, not in this case. On August 10, the ship date was moved to August 17. No big deal. she starts school in September, so probably a good thing that we ordered when we did... guess the Fall rush on laptops is on. On August 17, the ship date moved to August 31 -- and I had to call Dell or they would cancel the order "due to FTC regulations". So I called. a very nice lady (who is likely dealing with lots of irate customers) told me almost nothing about why the order was delayed and couldn't even promise that the ship date wouldn't move again.
I started doing some research and found Dell's blog which finally owned up to the problems last Friday. I also found this link where it seems that there are a whole lot of people really cheesed off.
It seems that Dell has had a paint and supply chain problem, but was still marketing the heck out of their laptops. So not only did that cause a backlog in orders, but it also caused a build capacity problem. In addition, rumor has it that Dell's new deal with Wal Mart has likely chewed up a fair amount of build capacity. As anyone who has ever dealt with Wal Mart knows, you don't underdeliver to them if you ever want shelf space in the future. so it may well be one of those "perfect storm" moments that really tests a company -- huge demand from normal sales channels and a new goliath channel (Wal Mart), unforecasted demand, supply chain shortages, and production problems.
So with the ship date now said to be Friday, I'm in a position that says if I don't have a tracking number on Saturday, the college kid and I will be at the Sony store at Woodfield Saturday morning picking up a Vaio CR Series in Sangria red. I've seen several in stock at Office depot and Best Buy, so I know that Sony is not having paint problems.
I guess what bugs me is that it has taken this long for the company to even begin to admit that they have a major problem on their hands. And when people have called Dell, they have been told lies (from what has been reported). Customer service is about remembering who is the customer and what role the customer has to play. Dell has historically done fairly well at that job, but it seems that the race for the bottom of price is causing yet another good company to abandon their heritage.
I really hope we get that laptop, but if they don't ship, they will have lost another customer.
So the college kid in my house decided that she wasn't going to lug the desktop PC and all of its peripherals back to Northwestern this year. The Cunningham Scholarship Fund met and determined that it was willing to pony up half the cost of a laptop, with the provisions that lost, stolen or busted laptops are not replaceable except through outlay of said college kid's own money.
We had been poking around Dell kiosks for a while. I've been a Dell guy with laptops for a while, having bought an Inspiron about 8 years ago and it is still ticking (granted, rather slowly -- but it will boot and eventually get around to launching a program). I've also been through most of the D series of Latitude laptops, with fairly decent results, considering this is my everyday computer at work for the past six or so years.
So I trust Dell and they have always exceeded expectations for me. Well, until now.
On July 24, we configured and ordered an Inspiron 1520 in "Ruby Red". The estimated shipping date was August 10 and my comment to my daughter was that it would probably be at the house before August 3rd, "because they always pad the shipping date". Um, not in this case. On August 10, the ship date was moved to August 17. No big deal. she starts school in September, so probably a good thing that we ordered when we did... guess the Fall rush on laptops is on. On August 17, the ship date moved to August 31 -- and I had to call Dell or they would cancel the order "due to FTC regulations". So I called. a very nice lady (who is likely dealing with lots of irate customers) told me almost nothing about why the order was delayed and couldn't even promise that the ship date wouldn't move again.
I started doing some research and found Dell's blog which finally owned up to the problems last Friday. I also found this link where it seems that there are a whole lot of people really cheesed off.
It seems that Dell has had a paint and supply chain problem, but was still marketing the heck out of their laptops. So not only did that cause a backlog in orders, but it also caused a build capacity problem. In addition, rumor has it that Dell's new deal with Wal Mart has likely chewed up a fair amount of build capacity. As anyone who has ever dealt with Wal Mart knows, you don't underdeliver to them if you ever want shelf space in the future. so it may well be one of those "perfect storm" moments that really tests a company -- huge demand from normal sales channels and a new goliath channel (Wal Mart), unforecasted demand, supply chain shortages, and production problems.
So with the ship date now said to be Friday, I'm in a position that says if I don't have a tracking number on Saturday, the college kid and I will be at the Sony store at Woodfield Saturday morning picking up a Vaio CR Series in Sangria red. I've seen several in stock at Office depot and Best Buy, so I know that Sony is not having paint problems.
I guess what bugs me is that it has taken this long for the company to even begin to admit that they have a major problem on their hands. And when people have called Dell, they have been told lies (from what has been reported). Customer service is about remembering who is the customer and what role the customer has to play. Dell has historically done fairly well at that job, but it seems that the race for the bottom of price is causing yet another good company to abandon their heritage.
I really hope we get that laptop, but if they don't ship, they will have lost another customer.
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