RMS Ireland Meeting 26 October 2006

The Records Management Society cordially invites all Records, Information and Archive Professionals interested in those issues affecting the profession in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to the 2nd meeting of the “RMS Ireland” regional group in Dublin City Hall, 26 October 2006.

In response to the feedback received from attendees at our inaugural meeting, leading practitioners in the field from different sectors will share their knowledge and experience of implementing practical steps for a successful records management programme in a series of case-studies and a practical workshop.

Please see below for details. If you would like to attend please contact: sah@eurofound.europa.eu.

A list of participants will be circulated at the meeting. If you do not wish your details to be included please notify us when you confirm attendance.


AGENDA
RECORDS MANAGEMENT SOCIETY IRELAND GROUP
CITY HALL, DAME STREET, DUBLIN 2
26 OCTOBER 2006

CLEARING THE FOG
PRACTICAL STEPS FOR SUCCESSFUL RECORDS MANAGEMENT

9.30 – 10.00 Registration & Coffee
10.00 – 10.05 Welcome address by John Tierney, Dublin City Manager, Dublin City Council

10.05 – 10.15 Introductions: Robert Corbett, Chair, RMS Ireland, Belfast City Council

10.15 – 11.00 Paul Dodgson, Leicestershire County Council
Establishing a Records Management Culture in your Organisation
Establishing a Records Management Policy and developing a Strategy, to deliver change, which will include: conducting information audits, developing file plans, retention schedules, change management, procurement, project management, EDRMS buy and build

11.00 – 11.20 Tea/Coffee and Networking Opportunity

11.20 – 11.30 Aidan Maher, Dublin City Council, will introduce the pre-lunch session

11.30 – 12.00 Lisa McElhinney, Records Manager, DIAGEO Ireland
Records Management in DIAGEO Ireland: the private sector experience

12.00 – 12.30 Claire Graham, Records Manager, Craigavon & Banbridge Community Health & Social Services Trust
Records Management in Health and Personal Social Services organisations in Northern Ireland
12.30– 12.45 Discussion

12.45 – 14.00 Lunch (sponsored by Glenbeigh Records Management)
and Networking Opportunity

14.00 – 15.30 Workshop on Developing a File Plan with Functional Value and Flexibility

14.00: Training session led by Paul Dodgson

14.30: Round Table discussion groups

15.00: Feedback from discussion groups

15.30 Closing remarks: Robert Corbett, Chair RMS Ireland

Please note that attendance is limited to 85 attendees due to space and Health and Safety considerations. Preference will, therefore, be given to members of the Records Management Society. Details available on www.rms-gb.org.uk.

RMS Ireland

The Inaugural Meeting of the Records Management Society Ireland Group (RMS Ireland) was held in the impressive surroundings of Belfast City Hall on 29 June.

The meeting which was formally opened by The High Sheriff of Belfast, Councillor William Humphreys, was attended by over 100 delegates representing the public, private and semi-state sectors from Ireland, North and South. The delegates heard presentations by Julie McLeod from the University of Northumbria, Paul Duller and Lawrence Rogers of the Records Management Society, Mike Beare and Harry McCabe of the Northern Ireland Civil Service EDRMS Project and Brendan Murphy of the HSE Mid-Western Area.

Following the presentations, and a lunch sponsored by Archives Consulting Services Ltd, delegates were asked to engage in an open discussion on the future role of RMS Ireland, topics for future discussion and education and the state of Records Management in Ireland.

Finally a Committee was elected to serve for the next 12 months, comprising principally of;

Robert Corbett – Chairman
Sarah Hayes – Secretary
Pat Reidy – Treasurer

The next meeting is planned for October, to take place in Dublin. This meeting will address the interests and concerns voiced by delegates at the inaugural meeting and a large turnout is to be hoped for again.

Archives Consulting Services

Looking over this blog I realise its been a long time since I posted anything, this has primarily been because I've been busy running my company Archives Consulting Services. Since we started in April 2005 the company staff and turnover have quadrupled, and we're now the acknowledged number 1 provider of Archives and Records Management services throughout Ireland. We're also the only consultancy in Europe to have successfully carried out ISO 15489 certification for our clients.

I've been speaking at a variety of conferences and seminars over the last months, and I hope to put some of my presentations online in the near future. However I'm currently managing a number of major projects in Dublin, Galway and Belfast so it may be a while before the next update.

In the interim, you can contact me through the Archives Consulting Services website if you require any information relating to your information, document, archives or records management needs.

Records Management and Organisational Change

You can see my Powerpoint presentation on Records Management and Organisational Change here. Many thanks to all that attended, and to Aidan Maher from Dublin City Council, Kerry Holland of UCD Archives Department and Martin Brown of SAP for their interesting presentations. Thanks also to SAP and Filestores for organising today's event.

Emails as Records

I found this interesting article on the ongoing question of "what to do with your emails" - as with all Records Management issues it really boils down to having proper policy and procedures in place.

Much of what is transmitted through an email system or an instant messaging (IM) system constitutes a ‘record’, or a document that must be kept for a minimum period of time that is often established by statute.

A messaging archiving system that can index, store and purge these records according to corporate or other policies is an important component of an overall messaging management strategy, particularly in heavily regulated industries, such as financial services or healthcare.

However, messaging archiving systems can also provide other benefits, including the ability to automatically migrate messaging system content to other storage media, thereby making messaging servers more efficient and users more productive.

Other benefits of messaging archiving systems include the ability to make the messaging system serve as a corporate knowledge store, allowing users to mine data for a variety of purposes.

Corporate Reluctance to Retain Messaging System Data

Virtually no enterprise decision maker is undecided about the costs associated with messaging (they want to reduce them), the need to deal with viruses or spam (they want to eliminate them) or the basic need for messaging capabilities (email is viewed as more important than the telephone in many enterprises). However, there is significant debate and uncertainty about whether or not to preserve the content of email and IM systems on a long term basis.

Report Focus

This report analyzes the North American market for messaging archiving, providing the results of two surveys that were conducted specifically for this report during May 2004. The report also offers a variety of other information from additional surveys and secondary research, as well as information on key requirements for messaging archiving systems.

This report analyzes the market for messaging archiving not only from a compliance perspective, but also from the perspective of the improved storage management, knowledge management and assistance with legal discovery that a messaging archiving system can provide.

Key Findings Presented in this Report

- Most enterprises do not preserve email and instant messages in an archiving system, instead relying on simple tape backups to preserve content from their messaging systems.

- Current practices by most non-regulated enterprises make it very difficult to recover old email during legal discovery, during a regulatory agency’s audit or simply when a user is looking for old content. However, during the past
three years, the IT departments of nearly three in four enterprises surveyed has been required to search through backup tapes in response to a formal legal, HR or other request. A large percentage of enterprises have been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee email.

- Compounding the problem is the fact that message stores are growing rapidly, increasing 24% in volume between May 2003 and May 2004.

- Although only 15% of enterprises surveyed employ a messaging archiving system, 62% of enterprises view such a system as either ‘desirable’ or ‘very desirable’, implying that there is significant unmet demand for messaging archiving capability.

- Most enterprises have no policies or systems in place to prevent users from deleting messaging system content that is important for the enterprise to retain on a long term basis.

- Fewer than one-half of enterprises have an email retention policy in place, despite the fact that virtually all enterprises use email for business applications.

- Most enterprises that are not heavily regulated, such as organizations outside of the financial services industry, are not satisfying the minimum data retention periods imposed by the array of statutory requirements for records retention.

- For the most part, enterprises view their preparedness for regulatory compliance to be inadequate.

Inside Government Article

My article on Decentralisation and Records Management for Inside Government Magazine is now available here. You can also see a text version of the article here.

Digitisation of Archival and Manuscript Materials in Libraries

You can see the presentation on Digitisation of Archival and Manuscript Materials in Libraries that I gave at this year's Library Expo in the RDS here.

For more on Scanning and Digitisation see the Archives Ireland Scanning Information page at www.archives.ie/scan.html