If you’d like to attend my presentation, here’s a link to the ARMA Metro MD registration page.

And if you are a reader of this blog, please be sure to introduce yourself.  Nothing would make me happier than an opportunity to hear from you in person.  Hope to see you there!

That said, I’ve reached a point where I don’t believe I can continue to speak in terms of records management as a separate notion from managing the lifecycle of all unstructured content.  As I’ve said in a number of interviews, I never fully bought into the idea that content can be divided into ‘records’ and ‘documents’.  This is a misleading concept that evolved almost by accident in the mid-90′s when document management applications (e.g. Documentum, OpenText, etc.) were developed separately from records management applications (e.g. TrueArc, Meridio, Tower TRIM, etc.), leading to the idea that is was perfectly acceptable to manage one but not the other. 

The fundamental flaw with this notion is that you can call one piece of content a ‘document’ and another piece of content a ‘record’, but none of that matters because in the eyes of the law it is all evidence.  Which, of course, means it is all discoverable and its unnecessary retention – or its premature disposition – can put an organization at tremendous risk.

So what does this mean to professional Records Managers?  It means our responsibilities have become much more far reaching than they have ever been before.  It means, quite simply, that we must take ownership of the entire lifecycle of our organization’s content.  We can no longer be content to sit back and let content come to us so we can manage it through its final end state.  Instead, we must be proactively involved in every phase of the information’s lifecycle.  From cradle to grave. 

This also means we should no longer speak in terms of ‘records management solutions’.  This term is simply no longer relevant.  We must now focus on information management solutions that address every phase of the information lifecycle.  And this must be done across the entire enterprise.  This is what I refer to as the Integrated Information Lifecycle Management (IILM) model and it includes all of the traditional records management functions, but also incorporates many features long considered outside standard records management responsibilities.  These include, but certainly aren’t limited to, the following:

• eDiscovery and information preservation orders
• Solution governance
• Retention and disposition of transitory content
• Email archiving policies
• Shared drive management and cleanup
• Enterprise taxonomy and metadata design
• Workflows
• Software obsolescence
• Hardware obsolescence
• Long term storage
• Physical records management
• Backup and recovery
• Continuity of Operations, vital records and disaster recovery
• Legacy solution integrations
• Document template creation
• Structured data lifecycle management
• Information Rights Management
• Privacy and security
• Social media best practices
• Web content management
• Many, many more…

So you’re probably thinking, ‘Sure, Don, that’s great and all, but isn’t this a SharePoint records and information management blog?’  To which I reply, ‘Yes.  Yes, it is.  Thank you for keeping me focused.’

I have a great deal of experienced with a number of the major enterprise content and records management solutions and I can honestly say that, with a few exceptions, they are terrific applications.  I also believe that most of them could be leveraged to implement the IILM model with varying levels of effort.  But I honestly believe that no other existing platform is in a better position to manage enterprise content from its creation, through its retention and to its final disposition than SharePoint.  And going forward into the New Year it will be my goal to demonstrate to you why I believe this is true.

Personally, I’m a little torn by the whole ‘cloud’ thing, but it reminds me a lot of the transition from mainframe computers to the client/server model we all went through 20 years or so ago.  (Yes, I’m that old.)

I can remember a lot of people I worked with who resisted the change for a long time.  And they often did so with fairly compelling arguments.  But eventually the obvious benefits of the client/server model overwhelmed even the most ardent opponents of change and, in the end, the new way of doing things was almost universally accepted. 

I don’t think operating in the cloud is a whole lot different.  There are plenty of good reasons not to do it.  But my sense is, over time, vendors will devise ways to mitigate those risks to the point that the anti-cloud argument will become more and more difficult to make.

Easily the most compelling argument I hear against a cloud-based solution from a Records Manager’s perspective is this: How do I manage my records repository pursuant to location-based compliance requirements when it’s not completely clear where my records repository even is?  Records Managers are very reluctant to give up control of their record repository.  This shouldn’t be surprising given it’s their neck that gets choked if regulations get violated or data sovereignty is beached.

So how can this risk be mitigated?  Enter Office 365 and the hybrid cloud model.  In a nutshell, a hybrid cloud model allows you to combine your current on-premises SharePoint records repository (and all the compliance and security that goes with it) with the cloud-based efficiency of Office 365. 

If your organization is contemplating a cloud computing strategy (and it should be) and you have concerns about your SharePoint records repository, I encourage you to learn more about hybrid cloud environments.   A great place to start is a terrific whitepaper on the subject by Paul Robinson of Microsoft, UK.  You can find it here.

Interestingly, Gartner notes that even though the global economy has been in a prolonged recession the last few years, spending on enterprise content and records management actually grew on a year after year basis.  Spending was up 5.1% in 2009 and increased again by 7.6% last year.  Moreover, they predict growth will continue at an impressive compound annual rate of 11.4% through 2015.  (Hey, maybe my kids will go to college after all!)

Gartner says its clients use ECM solutions to meet a number of productivity objectives, including regulatory compliance and e-discovery goals.  One of the keys to reaching these goals, they say, is an ‘integration with Microsoft Office Suite for management of new and collaboratively authored content’.  This is apparently true regardless of the ECM solution being used.

As for SharePoint as an ECM solution, Gartner says that over half the inquiries they receive about ECM solutions include a discussion of SharePoint.  Also, fully one-third of their client base is using SharePoint as the core of their records and content management strategy. 

Gartner cautions that many organizations see a continued need to add third-party tools to SharePoint 2010 to realize an acceptably robust enterprise ECM solution. This may be true, but I would argue that this is also the case for most of the other major ECM solutions and Microsoft’s extensive partner ecosystem allows customers to chose the SharePoint features they would like to extend without paying for additional functionality that may provide them no additional value.

Some of the strengths Gartner found in SharePoint 2010 include features and functionality that directly affect its records management capabilities.  These strengths include greater content management, taxonomy, metadata and search capabilities.

As usual, this report makes for pretty compelling reading for anyone in the content and records management business.    If you aren’t a Gartner client, you might want to go here to get a full copy of the report.

Looking forward, we are all very excited about the future of SharePoint-based records and information management, which has come a long way since we first started reporting on it three short years ago. 

With the release of SharePoint 2010 last year (and the subsequent release of a few key partner add-on applications), the ‘Holy Grail’ of enterprise records management – one solution providing true enterprise integrated information lifecycle management – is now a reality. 

We believe the next few years will prove to be a whirlwind of change throughout the industry.  One that will mark the transition from disorganized silos of valuable, desperate organizational content to an environment of effective and efficient information management that will help organizations grow and thrive for many years to come.

Again, thank you all for your support and we look forward to hearing from each of you…

Cheers,

Don