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Posts tagged 'information management'

15
Wed May
2013

The key to Information Management…

Posted by Tim Callister in Managing information

…winning the hearts and minds

Getting information management embedded in an organisation’s culture can be pretty hard. It can seem that, no matter what good programs and processes you develop and get signed off by senior management, users just don’t care.

Speaking to the business can be hard, so in this blog we’re going get through to your users through the power of Tolstoy. Trust me, it’ll be fine… probably.

 Planning

‘When starting on a journey… men capable of reflection are generally in a serious frame of mind. At such moments one reviews the past and plans for the future’

First of all we’re going to have to embrace the fact that some people just aren’t going to want to talk to you. Don’t take it personally, I’m sure they’re just busy. If they’re not and still won’t talk to you… well we’ll get to that.

As we all know, everyone loves it when a plan comes together. Everyone feels better if they’ve been a part of something that has worked and made a difference. So looking at what has been going on in the business area you’re engaging with, what problems and issues do they have, and what precedents has this set for poor information management?

If you can demonstrate on a storyboard where the team has been, where they are now, and where they could be, you’re already winning the war because they can see the advantages immediately and help shape the development and delivery of the information management strategy.

British soldiers at dinner in camp, Aldershot, 1889

The Information Managers; home in time for tea and medals (catalogue reference: COPY 1/397)

Continue reading »

1
Wed May
2013
1

The Empire: A case study in records appraisal

Posted by Rob Johnson in Managing information

Question: How does the Government know which records to send to The National Archives?

Answer: Through a process of ‘appraising’ records to identify those likely to be worthy of keeping forever. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But when you consider how much digital information is created everyday across every Government department and agency, how do you do this without reading every single file?

To explain this process, I’ve prepared a short case study, one which is slightly more abstract than the normal ‘Department X’ or ‘Agency Y’ scenarios. Based on the feedback we got on the Information Management in the Movies piece last year, and in honour of 4th May later this week, I’m officially revisiting Star Wars.

Nuffield Astronomy Laboratories at Jodrell Bank

Looking for a galaxy far, far away? (catalogue ref: INF 14/250)

The fictional ‘Galactic Empire’ employs thousands of staff, has extremely wide ranging functions and must therefore generate huge volumes of records. How would it decide what to send to The National Archives? Let’s find out:

Continue reading »

10
Wed Apr
2013

It’s not just about the technology…

Posted by Jo Moorshead in Managing information
Dear Information Agony Aunt

Help! I’ve recently been given the task of managing digital continuity within my organisation. The thing is I haven’t got a clue where to start. My organisation holds 15+ years’ worth of digital information across a range of different systems (some current and some legacy). I don’t think we have officially deleted anything. Isn’t there a whizzy piece of software that can solve our problems for us?

Your agony aunt at work (catalogue reference DEFE 1/322)

Your agony aunt at work (catalogue reference DEFE 1/322)

Confused

 

Dear Confused

If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard someone say that software could solve all their ills, I’d be a very rich agony aunt! The bad news is that I am not aware of such a system.

The good news is that there are a number of steps that you can take to start getting a handle on this within your organisation:

Continue reading »

22
Fri Mar
2013
1

Dastardly Digital Dilemmas: 6) Heresy

Posted by Mark Merifield in Managing information

OK, let’s get it out there.

I don’t want to manage information.

I really don’t.

And I’m sure many of you out there will agree with me.

I support government in managing information and ensuring the historical record, so I’m an information creator and user and an information professional. I exist in a world of perpetual contradiction…

I’m busy. I spend my days creating, processing, using, sharing, storing and talking information. My team has a way of working, a shared space to capture our work, and delivery channels through which to share it. I know what we’re working on, where it is and what it means to us. It works. For us. Sometimes I want to work on the move, drafting blog posts like this on a mobile device on a train. Sometimes I want remote access to our network so I can access the information my team are working on.

Continue reading »

6
Wed Mar
2013
1

The bones of the matter: Keeping it together, when it isn’t

Posted by Julie Zielstra in Managing information
Illustration of magic trick showing skeleton with disguised assistant to make it seem disarticulated

The disarticulated skeleton shared by plaisanter on Flickr. CC by-SA 2.0

How can records managers support access and provide context in an age where people and systems create and store masses of information that may be related, across many locations? It doesn’t have to be a magic act, but there are some ways to help make it hang together and support the lifecycle management of organisational information.

Records managers have the opportunity to lead and become the experts within their organisations in the use and application of the technologies that can trawl the many places, including the web and social media, to find information, provide context and make it appear together either for the end user or for automated actions – sometimes referred to as ‘actionable analytics’.

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8
Fri Feb
2013

Dastardly Digital Dilemmas: 5) Losing your supplier

Posted by Mark Merifield in Managing information, Technology and innovation

Server roomOn our Digital Continuity training course we cover a situation where the supplier of your records management system withdraws support. Yesterday the administrators of 2e2, who supply the Wisdom EDRM product, announced that that business operation had ceased following an unsuccessful attempt to find a buyer.

So what do you do in such circumstances? The Information Management Services team here at The National Archives have the following advice drawn from our Digital Continuity guidance: Continue reading »

25
Fri Jan
2013

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon and information management

Posted by Rob Johnson in Managing information

Information management is all about understanding connections.

Web browsing, search engines, metadata, hyperlinks, embedded content, attachments, tag clouds – data rarely exists in isolation anymore, and it’s the job of information managers to ensure that during times of change information assets retain their context and accessibility.

Sow and Piglets

Bacon to information management in six steps (ref. CO 1069/295/88)

Which brings me to the ‘six degrees of separation’: the concept that you are only ever six steps of ‘connection’ from anyone else in the world. A recent TV advert plays on this idea by linking their 4G mobile phone company to actor Kevin Bacon in under 30 seconds, using a series of tenuous connections.

This, of course, gave me an idea… if Kevin Bacon could link himself to mobile phones, can I link him to good digital information management in six steps? And what ‘cautionary tales’ can I bring in along the way?

Let’s find out:

 

Continue reading »

4
Fri Jan
2013
2

Getting your five a day – it takes a lot of information to make a garden grow

Posted by Julie Zielstra in Managing information

Information isn’t like apples and oranges, or even vegetables, but after my first year gardening on an allotment I realised how much information management I used to grow a simple salad.

Dig for plenty, by Le Bon

Dig for plenty, by Le Bon (catalogue reference INF 3/98)

Those uniform bags of leaves sitting in the supermarket cooler had me lulled into a false sense of the ease and simplicity of the mechanics of planning, growing, protecting, distributing and finally storing the crop until it was time to eat.

If you haven’t gardened on an allotment before, it’s a community spirit geared towards the frugal application of resources, sharing and recycling, to create an abundance of crops. We’re seeing this attitude in the management of information as well – less is more, collaboration is necessary. When I started writing this blog post, I wanted to explain how an allotment is like a community cloud – I could use my own garden, but I choose to share a place that I pay for and can walk away from – hopefully with plenty of delicious food! But the Cloud is hogging the show lately – information management is needed whether it’s a cloud or your own servers and infrastructure.

Continue reading »

30
Fri Nov
2012
6

The drive less shared

Posted by Tim Callister in Managing information

Despite over a decade in helping users understand information management and getting them to accept that shaping information in the way you need to use it can actually make them happier… it doesn’t matter. The only time I’ve ever seen users not default to a shared drive is if they are less than ten feet from a printer.

Applications have become richer in their functionality and what they can interoperate with to deliver ever more developed workflows and case management. There are tools which provide an entire platform that can let you do just about anything with information, from web publishing to day-to-day processing.

Still it doesn’t matter; shared drives trump everything, all the time, everywhere in the world. This blog post isn’t big enough to explore all the reasons why users do this (and there are many). But what I do have space for is this; two challenges – one for us and one for developers.

Challenge 1 – Us

Turning off the shared drive! 1 I mean the complete shut down of the NTFS – no corporate drive and no user drives… nothing. Could it be done without risking information management and digital continuity? Would users spontaneously combust?

Continue reading »

Notes:

  1. 1. This is a hypothetical challenge. Please don’t go to your ICT department demanding the shared drive be shut off this afternoon! ^