Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

Responding to the most thoughtful post of Jesse Wilkins...

James argues that IDARS has nothing to do with records management and is more about report management. I think there's a relation between IDARS and RM on the one hand and between IDARS and ERM (enterprise report management) on the other - but these are neither complete nor exclusive.

As stated, I am going on what I have learned from others which leads me to believe that there is no common definition for what even comprises records management.

for example in the case of federated records management. It's used to put a control framework around those records so that items declared as records cannot be edited or deleted prior to the expiration of the retention period, which is itself assigned according to the legal, administrative, fiscal, and historical value of the records.

I would love to understand why this is any different than simply placing Access Control Lists on stuff stored in Documentum, Alfresco, Nuxeo or Stellent?

For those documents where the paper is not mandated to be kept, I agree that a better approach is to scan everything of value into e.g. Documentum or FileNet. I also agree that there are significant drawbacks with microfilm, including time to create, time to retrieve, need for controlled climate storage, etc.

Jesse only mentioned the big enterprisey guys and didn't mention open source players such as Nuxeo or even pseudo open source players such as Alfresco. I wonder if he is pro or con towards open source?

But with electronic storage comes another issue: preservation. CAD drawings, Microsoft Office documents, Adobe PDFs....none of these will last the lifespan of a building, or of a 787, or even more than 10 years, due to media lifespan, hardware availability, and software compatibility issues.

You are now crossing into a space that security folks understand which is the notion of retention policies. I would argue though that enterprises keep too much information and need to start figuring out how to delete things to make the need for records management go away.

Here's where I think James misses the RM boat. An enterprise that relegates effective records management - including policies, processes, skills, AND technology enablers - to 996th out of 1000 will almost assuredly end up regretting it, and that sooner than later.

For folks who will get it twisted, I didn't say that this was the priority of my organization or am I recommending anyone else to think about it this way. I am merely stating what it in terms of the priority of my particular agenda.

For those interested in much more information about records management and its practice regardless of the media used to store records, visit ARMA International (formerly the Association of Records Managers and Administrators) at http://www.arma.org. Again in the interests of full disclosure, I sit on the ARMA International Board of Directors. Their annual meeting and conference is Oct 7-10 in Baltimore, MD;

Is anyone on the agenda going to talk about interoperability between records management systems? Any conversations about creating open source to solve the challenges in the records management space? Will there be conversations solely focused on those who are somewhat indoctrinated and otherwise insular or will the conversation be more focused on those outsiders such as myself where we can figure out how to incorporate it into enterprise architecture?