One of the songs on my much-cherished iPhone these days is "Risk is Right" by a group called Tin Cup Gypsy. It's catchy, and although the band might not have realized this, it's about records management. (Play the song on the band's Facebook or MySpace page. You'll like it.)
We talk about records management and risk together all the time, and we should. What are the risks to our company if we don't keep this record long enough? What are the risks if we keep it too long? How do we manage the risks to our organization through disaster recovery planning? How do we manage information and the risks involved with legal discovery? There are days when risk alone is enough to turn staff, management, and IT into records management true believers.
For some of our organizations, though, things like lawsuits and disasters and loss of institutional knowledge don't feel real. Those things happen to other people, not to us. You hear things like, "Show me one government official or corporate middle manager who's gone to jail because he/she destroyed records," and "Well, we've never had that problem here," and "I don't have time for this - I have work to do." Risk is only scary when it's seen as real, and too often, records management is only seen as necessary after it's too late.
I wonder sometimes whether our commitment to helping our organizations avoid risk takes us too far away from the positive risks that might bring other benefits. There are risks in talking to IT: They might laugh at us or they might insist the stuff on those servers is "data" and not "records." Even worse, they might realize they could use our help, and then where would we be? There are risks in trying new technology. While we're saying "no" to blogs, wikis, social networks, and other semantic-cloud-mobile-mashup goodies because they don't fit into a print-and-file world, many of our customers are already using them. The greatest risk isn't using these tools - it's sitting around hoping they'll go away or counting on someone else to deal with the problem.
There are some reasonable risks records managers could take. We could work together across company and agency lines to find ways to retain and "archive" information from different Web 2.0 tools. What metadata should be captured for your Twitter feed? Do you capture all the feeds you follow, only your posts and direct replies, your profile, your page design? If a small group of ARMA and SAA members brainstormed together to create some basic requirements, then tested different tools, we could have the first steps down the road. If the group took a second risk and shared that information with the larger Web user community for comment, we might find even more creative solutions. User communities help technology and software makers create new features all the time. Why couldn't records managers use that strategy?
We need to talk to each other. We need to try new technologies and ask good questions about them early in the game. The song concludes, "We only have one chance to play, and life's too short to be afraid." Good records management needs to be about taking intelligent risks, too.
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