Pragmatic RM

Yesterday was a busy day on this blog - due in large part to Jesse Wilkins at Imerge Consulting posting a link and flattering endorsement to the blog on recmgmt-l@lists.ufl.edu.
Out from that flurry of activity two messages I quote from below - firstly a message from David in Australia who said....

"what the newly awakened world of compliance needs is pragmatic RM which is only loosley associated with RM as we know it!"

Then an amazingly interesting message from my old friend George Parapadakis (one of the true ECM guru's - remember Document Avenue anyone?) who told me about somebody he knows in Europe who has....

managed to instigate a formal RM environment while dispersing completely with any formal hierarchical structures such as FilePlan. All categorisation is done through metadata, and predefined search templates.

As you know, we've been talking about this concept for a while in DM. If your documents are correctly indexed through metadata, you can effectively "simulate" any hierarchical structure you need, through searching and reporting. But this is the first time I have come across an example where the technique is being used in practice, in a real business environment. In my view, it changes the whole RM vs.DM debate since the only differentiation between formal records and any other document, is the retention period, security and classification.


On my next European trip I very much hope to meet with this guy and see for myself what he is doing. For the danger of blogs like this is that people like me point out the problems, but don't always offer solutions. I very much want to offer solutions, and my colleagues and I, along with many in the broader ECM community are trying hard to come up with simpler and more effective ways of working.

At Wipro we are working on some fascinating projects in ECM/RM and WCM and helping some major clients and vendors to move to what we believe is the next generation of information management. Unfortunatly much of this work (in fact most) is under strict non-disclosure, for understandable reasons and cannot be shared here.

However, my thoughts are my own, and I hope that this blog may become something of a forum for those of us who want to move away, from technology heavy, and overly prescriptive methods of managing content. Toward a more pragmatic approach (pragmatic seems to be the word that resonates).

With this in mind - I am set to deliver a track keynote at the AIIM Conference in Philadelphia next May. The topic is ECM in 10 years time - I would invite all of you to send your thoughts to me on this, either to the blog or my email. Ideally I would like that presentation to be something a sharing of group thoughts on the topic, and a talk that helps set the agenda.

And of course the most important news today is that - England beat India in the 3rd Test!