RM as a discipline is seeking new orthodoxies: we are at a crossroads. One possible future orthodoxy is the “records repository model” – where a business classification scheme is held in a back end system (above item), and applied to content held in the various applications used by colleagues (item level).
As more and more applications come on stream in organizations individuals and teams have increased choice as to how and where they keep their records. This makes it problematic to insist on one corporate records system, and to apply retention and access rules. That's the impact of the individual orange world (incl. social Media) on the corporate blue world.
We have to live with the fact that Organizations have an information archaeology, not an information architecture (p. 254 Lappin). Digital landfill specialists ... is also a good term.
Dump and pick will be the paradigm in big organizations as transparency is not even a required principle from a legal perspective.
RM is the art of throwing things away. Therefore we have to focus on the enforcement of our disposition policy.
This is not about losing confidence in the RM profession as records are generated every day and we have no choice to keep them.
But we have to retreat from some orthodoxies (e.g. EDRMS as the only solution and centralizing paradigm which has brought us to a vendor-led profession) as James Lappin explains in his excellent article.
This refers to Lappins article in the latest issue of the Records Mgmt Journal, p.252-264 (Vol.20, Nr.3 2010): What will be the next records management orthodoxy?
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