Records management in the Cloud? Records management IS the Cloud!

Abstract

This article discusses the challenges that contemporary technology present to records management. The costs of traditional records management are increasing. At the same time Cloud computing provides an exciting opportunity to contain costs while increasing organizational capability. Good records management is fundamental to the sustainability of organizations but is seldom seen as anything other than a burdensome addition to the day job by employees. In grappling with the implications of digital and paper records, records managers are not yet dealing with the fact that the sheer economics, volume and challenge of managing information — as records or other ‘stuff’ — simply mandates an automated technical easy to use solution. The Cloud, because it operates at the level of content, can drive dramatic change in the professions working on content management and address the continual expansion in the content created — and this includes forward thinking records managers. The Web together with the Cloud also delivers a new challenge to records management — to open up content for others to use in inclusive participation not hide it away for exclusive use. The article argues that Cloud based innovation will stimulate organizations to reconsider what information they wish to protect and what to release. In a digital world transparency rather than protection will be the stronger influence as seen in the UK’s government plans for opening up data. Organizations will use far more information from the Web and internally will see that it has become simpler and better to recreate much of the information, now protected as records, than to rely on stored old versions. The new records management lifecycle needs to promote an obsession with content use rather than protection. The capture of contextual data at source will transform the way a record can be used. The cost of storage will cease to be an issue instead new values of storage will drive policy. Records management will become use based not store based and placing the new activities of records management at the heart of the living company.