Talk to people here and most will tell you some of their biggest challenges are handling the huge volume of emails and electronic documents their organizations are currently generating. So it makes sense that in walking around the Expo Hall, you notice that there as some really exciting things going on with respect to IT and RM. The good people at Google, for instance, are doing some pretty impressive things with enterprise e-mail archiving. Another company, a.k.a., has got a taxonomy software offering that you can imagine larger enterprises everywhere wanting to get their hands on A.S.A.P.
We are going to sit down with both vendors tomorrow and get the scoop on what exactly they are going and get their take on what role these types of tools will be playing in RM going forward.
And this steadily increasing IT oriented presence in RM is ironic because there is an age-old tension between RM and IT traditionally. There was a seminar this afternoon on just that subject, called Communicating with IT given by Tim O’Keefe, Ph.D.
It was a great presentation. As an IT professional himself, he probes the extremes of the stereotypical IT persona and how the traits that make people self-select for that line of work also make it more difficult for disciplines like RM to communicate with them.
And beyond conflicting communication styles, there are some fundamental differences on how both groups view the basics, like the definition of a record. For RM it is about content, while for IT it is data, what IT sees as a source document is a record for RM, and so on.
And while you might take issue with some of O’Keefe’s characterizations on both sides, his approach to bridging the gap is quite interesting.
Fundamentally he believes that IT folks are focused on achieving and growing within their jobs, and they are much less concerned about how people perceive them. So it is up to RM to offer an olive branch, understand the IT mindset, and use that understanding to build RM goals into IT’s strategic plans. You have to make the case for why IT needs RM, but whatever you do, don’t say compliance, according to O’Keefe.
At a time when so many RM challenges originate in the digital domain, when even IBM is building RM functions into IT infrastructure, and given the neat new software tools that are out there, maybe reconciliation between RM and IT won’t be far behind.
