Technology and the Transformation of the
Workplace: Lessons Learned Traveling Down the Garden Path
Richard E. Barry
Principal,
Barry Associates
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss relationships
between technology and workplace patterns that govern how records are created
and to demonstrate the impact of these relationships on an organization’s
recordkeeping risks and practices. It
reflects on more than forty years of personal work experience in information
management and technology and the impact of changing technology and work
patterns on recordkeeping. So far,
technology hasn’t changed what it means for something to be a “record” but it
has certainly changed how records must be managed to minimize organizational risks. This chapter’s premise is that changing work
patterns produce new technologies; that the reverse is also true; that these
changes govern how records are produced; and this, in turn, determines to a
large extent how records must be managed.
Writing is a Technology
As used in the context of this discussion, the term technology
is used in the broadest sense, including writing itself. Walter J. Ong, S.J., says:
Technologies are not mere exterior aids
but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when
they affect the word. Such
transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness…The use of a
technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its
interior life. Writing is an even more deeply interiorized technology than
instrumental musical performance is. But to understand what it is, which means
to understand it in relation to its past, to orality, the fact that it is a
technology must be honestly faced.[1]
Ong reminds us that while Homo sapiens has been on
earth for some 50,000 years, the earliest writing system we know about was
developed only about 3500 BC. It changed the way humans thought and how they
communicated, remembered and preserved their thoughts. It was technology that
ultimately made modern recordkeeping possible and legitimate. Before advances
in printing, typically only first-person oral testimony and some forms of
physical evidence were regarded as trustworthy evidence in courts. This advance
in writing technology and the great cultural changes that it brought about in
literacy changed all that forever.
Western legal systems changed to permit the use of evidence that was not
produced in person by human witnesses, but rather in trustworthy written forms.
The ‘exception to hearsay’ rule is still the basis for extending recordkeeping
to the court system.
That workpattern changes produce new technologies and vice
versa is nothing new. The above examples are not limited to the 20th
Century or even the industrial revolution. M.T. Clanchy describes an earlier
technology in which “tally sticks” used the medium of wood to create the “hard
copy” record of business transactions, and also as a copying technology.
Appropriate notches were placed on a wooden rod to indicate numbers representing
a cash transaction. The rod could then be split down the middle to create a
receipt. Similarly, Clanchy tells
us:
The most important equipment to the
twelfth-century writer who composed for himself or wrote from dictation, as
distinct from the copyist, was not the parchment book depicted in conventional
portraits of scribes, but the writing tablets on which he noted from his
drafts. The tablets were ordinarily made of wood, overlaid with coloured wax,
and often folded into a diptych which could be worn on a belt. When something
needed noting down, the diptych was opened, thus exposing the waxed surfaces,
which were written on with a stylus. [2]
Might we envision the tablet as an early-day version of the
hand held computer, without sustainable memory? Why not? Clanchy goes on to say that “It seems to have been
common practice
for monastic authors to write on wax and then have a fair copy made on
parchment.”[3] Is it such a
reach to see today’s professional as a latter-day reincarnation of the 12th
Century writer with her electronic “tablet” in hand, stylus at work changing a
calendar or contact database that will be beamed up to her desktop computer
later on?
Technology: No Proselytizing or Whining
Microsoft is about to put a trademark on a new form of tablet.
Its “Tablet PC” team is busily working toward a 2002 product designed to use
with all kinds of multimedia objects and conceivably become a replacement of,
rather than – like current hand-held appliances – augmentation to, one’s
notebook and desktop computers. Writing on the Tablet PC, Steven Levy says this
is really the fruition of an early Xerox Palo Alto Research Center “Dynabook”
vision.
The dream of a great tablet-based computer predates the PC
itself. In 1971—when Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were still taking high-school
classes and “portable computer” meant “get the forklift”—Alan Kay of the fabled
Xerox PARC research lab sketched out Dynabook. It would be a light, intimate,
keyboardless device that ran software based on his innovative Smalltalk language
(a precursor of our now ubiquitous mouse-and-point systems)…[I]n 1972 PARC
engineers…asked Kay if they could take a stab at building his “little machine.”
Considering the state of technology then, it was amazing that they produced the
Alto, a desktop computer whose screen looked like, well, a piece of paper. (The
Alto was itself the inspiration for 1984’s Macintosh, which Kay grudgingly
called “the first personal computer good enough to criticize.”) Since the idea
was to make something not much bigger than a legal pad, the PARC people called
the Alto an “interim Dynabook.”[4]
It is not my purpose here to proselytize technology or to
suggest that it doesn’t sometimes bring with it unintended and undesirable
human or social consequences[5].
I have sometimes challenged my archives and records management (ARM)[6]
colleagues around the world to “stop whining about technology,” even though it
gives them so much ‘heartburn’ in their difficult jobs of identifying,
organizing for, preserving and otherwise managing the capture and disposition
of organizational records. They are not in charge of workplace patterns or
systems or the uptake of new IT in their organizations. Even Chief Information Officers (CIOs)
sometimes experience the same frustration with sudden spread of a new
unapproved or unsupported software package around the organization that some
early-adopter employee obtained for personal use and concluded that it could
really make life easier in the office; it did and the word got around like a
hot, new non-prescription remedy. The fact is that organizations and workplaces
are like biological organisms. They grow and adapt, and we don’t always have
full control over the ways they do. And that isn’t all bad considering that
much adaptation is to make it work better.
Innovations In Work Patterns or Technology:
Which Comes First?
Core organizational purposes should govern organizational
aims and objectives and they should be the basis for the creation of business
processes, which, in turn, should drive information (including records) and
information management needs and information management architectures. These
should drive information technology architectures and decisions. According to
Ian Wilson, National Archivist of Canada, “An IM vision cannot exist without a
business vision. In fact it is the business vision which should drive the IM
vision and both, in turn, should drive the technology vision - or at least
that’s the way it should work.” [7]
That’s how I was raised.
This more traditional approach likely will result in the
application of fairly well proven technologies. Technology introduced this way,
at the end of the food chain is more likely to gain broad staff acceptance,
because it is easier to develop a persuasive rationale for its introduction.
Until recent years, we would rarely, if ever, hear anyone admit that it should
ever be the other way around – that the organization should adapt to
information technology products. Yet, the manufacturing industry has been doing
it for years. Consider the automotive industry and what has changed in the way
products are tooled and assembled today using robots in contrast to even 1980 –
around the time that the PC was about to jump out of the box. Consider the PC
industry now versus 1980. How differently they are put into the box using
automated packaging.
Is technology still the endpoint? My observations and
experience in recent years tell me that some long-standing principles are
shifting under my feet and a new kind of math is now at work. There is a greater symbiosis between work
and technology. People do sometimes put the technology cart in front of the
organizational horse, intentionally or otherwise, and at times with very good
results. Sometimes creative or insightful people can see in a new technology
the potential for positively changing established business requirements in a
way that some broad business aim can be better realized or some supporting
process can be better performed.
Business-Driven Technological Innovation
As an example involving broader business aim, an
organization might see the possibility of using modern database integration
technology to provide a wholly different way of shaping the organization’s
relationships with its customers. This
might be done by making otherwise disparate information on past client
purchases or interactions more readily accessible to the organization’s
customer call center staff in a manner that makes the customer interaction
shorter and more to the point for both the client and the serving organization.
This example could apply equally well to: a company providing customer
technical support for software products or personal computers; a government
agency providing social services; a church responding to calls from its
homebound members; or an academic institution providing research grant
information.
As an example at the process level, an organization might
see the potential applicability of workflow technology in streamlining its
“order fulfillment” process that covers the life cycle of transactions
necessary to move individual orders from how and when they come into the
organization to how and when they are actually received by the customers.
Again, even if not recognized as an order fulfillment process as such, this
example could apply to organizations in the private or public sectors,
academia, non-profit organizations, etc.
It happens when people are thinking in terms of what the organization is
all about, and how it can do better doing what it is all about. Such discoveries
may be made by the executive concerned about business aim fulfillment, by a
thoughtful person who is responsible for a particular business line, or by
specialists in information management, including records management, or
information technology. In some cases, the idea may originate with client
complaints about current practices.
Technology-Driven Business Innovation
Such innovations may also be born in companies that develop
technology. For example, IBM, Xerox and Dragon Systems have carried out
extensive computational linguistics research for several years in the belief
that it would open up new markets.
Among the results of that research have been software systems that to
some level of success: convert the
spoken word into text; convert text from one language to another; create abstracts
of long documents; automatically classify text documents into established
categories (business processes, file schemes, records series, etc.) In true
basic research, such as the kind that the old Bell Labs did that created
countless tremendously important inventions and discoveries, no particular
product drove the research. In applied research, which is increasingly the way
that today’s fast-payoff research is being carried out, a particular product or
market typically governs the direction of product development. Yet, along the
way, other products not earlier contemplated may be developed even
accidentally. When they are, the company thinks of ways in which such a
technology might be spun off to create a market that wasn’t there
before. When that works, and organizations see a real opportunity to leap frog
ahead of the competition, whether in the private sector for market share or the
public and non-profit sectors for budget share. Where organizations become
early adapters of such technology, it can be said that the technology is
driving workplace patterns rather than the reverse.
Changing work patterns brought about by technological
innovations are becoming much more common than ever in ways that are making
many of us from the old school wonder if this approach will overtake the
traditional sequence whereby workplace change drives technology as described
above. This isn’t totally accidental.
It has come about as the natural succession of events, in my opinion, beginning
with near contemporaneous political and technological events – the fall of the
Berlin Wall in November 1989 often associated as the first domino in the fall
of the Cold War (some would even say it was the final act of World War I);
advances in telecommunications technologies; the dramatic rise in the use of
the Internet; and the creation of the World Wide Web and browser technology,
including Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in the early 1990s. These events
came together to make it possible for a global economy to take off like
wildfire. Old enemies became new trade
partners, old allies competitors.
Competition became the byword and this caused a growing
number of organizations to become early adopters of new technologies, even when
it meant changing work patterns and organizational arrangements to make fast
use of technological innovations. Some very large corporations have quietly
adopted a policy of changing their organizations however may be required to
adapt to software changes in their ERP systems, even if it means reorganizing around
the system, changing organizational makeup or eliminating organizational units.
This allows them to adopt ERP innovations as soon as they are introduced by the
developers and thus to gain even a short-lived competitive advantage in the
marketplace until the next such opportunity comes along or is made. CIOs and IT
specialists often jump at such opportunities because it places IT in the
forefront as a major stakeholder in organizational change and also helps to
significantly reduce their ‘total cost of operations’ or ‘TCO’, the CIO’s ever
crucial benchmark for budgeting IT support.[8]
When organizations have to write APIs to adapt new technology or upgrades to
the existing organization, there is a direct and continuing addition to TCO to
maintain such software. When APIs are not necessary or can be minimized, TCO is
kept to a minimum and that is good for IT budgets. Does minimizing TCO equate
to more effective business systems? Not necessarily. It may in the eyes of the
CIO but may not in the eyes of the manager responsible for the business
process(es), or BPs, being supported by the technology. However, competitive
pressures are causing business managers to take the same perspective in many
organizations now. Either way, this is why it is so important that so-called
“technological” decisions be made with the involvement of all of the
stakeholders – affected business manager, records manager, general counsel,
auditor and, of course, CIO or those responsible for information management and
information technology – even CEOs for mission-critical systems.
For the Record
These changes obviously influence the manner in which
records are produced and may even mean that records that used to be produced no
longer are. As noted above, actions and transactions are carried out by such
systems and communicated among systems; but they may not be recorded along the
way or not in ways that can be viewed by humans in the future – in ways that
would qualify them as trustworthy recordkeeping systems.
The rise in use of information technology systems is
creating volumes of records that exceed those of the past by orders of
magnitude. This issue requires more depth of treatment than dismissal on the
grounds that digital storage is becoming cheaper by the year. What value is there to organizations and
society to keeping so much for long periods of time? How will we find relevant
information in a timely manner in the future? Unfortunately, information
navigation aids historically have not kept up with advances in storage technology.
Nor do they get cheaper by the year, neither in terms of direct costs or TCO.
The more appropriate question is: what is at risk if we don’t keep all or most
of that information – all of those records?
Archivists, other records management professionals,
organizational executives and in some cases society at large will have to
revisit established rules and practices and ask: what really constitutes essential
records for mid-term or long-term preservation for different kinds of
organizations and organizational business? How can we continue to meet
legitimate requirements for operational continuity, corporate memory, future
research and changing organizational needs such as knowledge and content
management requirements that may be at odds with other recordkeeping
requirements – in short, recordkeeping and information usage needs – without
becoming inundated with trivial data? Do our concepts of how we place value on
information (what archivists call appraisal and what for better or worse is a
very subjective process) need to be changed to reflect the realities of the
information age? Should we sharpen our understandings of how we judge the
recordworthiness of information and what constitutes trivial versus essential
data? A suggestion to this effect was raised in Pittsburgh in 1997[9]
at a small gathering of leading professionals who specialize in electronic
records management. It was greeted with the great sound of silence. Recent
discussions on the Australian archivists discussion list of “re-appraisal” an
the possible need to rethink what constitutes records of continuing value have
been met not with the sound of silence but with the sound of considerable
professional difference of opinion.
Who is Steering the Ship?
Most ordinary workers in the workplace don't cry for
workplace innovations they don’t bring about themselves. On the contrary,
technological innovations may be seen as threats to job security or to the
“time honored” and well understood ways of doing things. Such concerns are often well founded as the
streamlining of workplace patterns frequently involves the automation of
functions earlier carried out all or in part by humans. All of us have been on
the wrong side of technological innovations gone wrong or at least experiencing
significant start-up problems: “Sorry but we just went on a new computer
system.” We sometimes get the impression that humans aren’t responsible for
poor system design, omissions or mistakes their systems make. Paradoxically,
people tend to assume that it must be right if it is in the computer, until we
learn about such incidences as the mistaken ‘smart bombing’ of an embassy that
was supposed to have been a military installation of another country – because
of outdated satellite mapping information where a current tourist map would
have been more accurate.[10]
Records managers are required to do what needs to be done to
properly preserve and otherwise manage record whether they like the new
technologies that produce them or not. Complex documents and records
that include combinations of text, graphics and spreadsheets are already in
universal use. Dynamic documents and records are becoming equally
pervasive to carry more relevant, up-to-date and compelling content by using
combinations of text, spreadsheets that contain object linking and embedding,
hyperlinks to other records, video clips, etc.
Perhaps the most common current usage of complex and dynamic
documents is in the form of MS PowerPoint ™ or other presentations. Dynamic
websites, to the extent that they are not fully reflected in underlying
records, is another example. Growing use of these technologies, hardly any
longer experimental, may be a precursor of things to come in other forms of
multimedia documentation. Recent versions of presentation systems provide for
embedded objects including video clips, animation and special textual effects
and those facilities are already in common use. Already some of the most
important documents in today’s organizations are in the form of such
presentations. Sometimes these constitute the only real documentation of
options and recommendations presented to management in support of particular
decisions. In some cases, such presentations in the form of electronic files
constitute the key deliverable of a consulting contract. Yet, very few organizations
manage such presentations files as records.
It isn’t always easy to discern what led to workplace
changes. Is the use of multimedia
documents a response to a perceived problem, such as the need to get
complicated issues across in simpler, more easily understood than the
old-fashioned textual ways? Or is multimedia a solution in search of a problem?
It doesn’t matter if it really takes off. Perhaps it is more realistic to see
work and technology as parts of a continuous feedback loop where work needs
spawn technological requirements that may be only partly satisfied by
technological innovation that is then reacted to in the workplace and refined
in later innovations; and sometimes technology results in unexpected or
unintended innovations in work patterns and the cycle begins again.
What does matter is that ARM professionals recognize
sometime subtle sea changes in technology or the workplace and deal with them,
beyond debate. In an exchange on a
professional discussion list on the recordness of databases, one Records
Officer said:
Good idea, bad idea: we are not being asked. Soon we will be haggling
in the parking lot as the cars drive away. Many don't like what's happening.
The reality is that we are not making the decisions that drive business and our
influence in this area is waning. People are asking for answers that we should
be able to provide, and I think that if we were truly willing to break out of
our hidebound ways we could provide timely and constructive advice on managing
records in today's business environment.
In the following sections, I will illustrate some of the
earlier points with a few personal experiences and observations over the past
40+ years. During that period, I was fortunate to have been an observer of
information technology and how it has changed work and recordkeeping.[11]
1960s: Early Command and Control System Project. Information
technology in the 1960s was largely confined to centralized, mainframe computer
systems with highly structured data-centric applications. Most of these
applications were transaction-oriented and mostly in the financial sector --
accounting systems, payroll systems, etc. There was a certain likeness between
the statuses of management information systems in the sixties and electronic
records systems in the early nineties -- they were very much topics of
discussion and debate at professional conferences, but there was little by way
of well-implemented, operational, systems. It was my good fortune, as a young
naval aviator in 1960, to be assigned to a newly created “Command, Control, and Communications” (“C3”)
group to integrate Armed Forces readiness information as part of the implementation
of the Defense Reorganization Act of 1958.
The project created a messaging system that would be used by all U.S.
Armed Forces, overcoming previous independent and inconsistent readiness
reporting schemes of the different services.
The Joint Operational Reporting (JOPREP) System – still operational
today – was fully digitized so that the system for reporting the readiness of
U.S. conventional and nuclear forces worldwide was fully automated. It provided the basis for a daily briefing
for the Joint Chiefs and, as required, for the Commander in Chief. The
experience reinforced the idea that if one focuses on the operational needs
first, rather than the technology, results are more likely to be successful and
enduring. It was the defining experience
for me in the use of information management and technology tools to address
business needs and was instrumental in my decision to leave the service and
make a career in this field.
Paper printouts were regarded as the residue of the JOPREP
system. Computer tapes were kept purely for backup reasons, not because anyone
thought of them as "the record". As is the case today, they would not
have been very useful as a trustworthy records repository or information stores
for selectively retrieving or presenting the component messages or summary
reports. No military archivist, records manager or historian showed up, and we
didn't know enough to ask. Yet records like these were crucial to military
historians whose job it was to reconstruct crisis situations retrospectively to
learn lessons for the future -- a classical example of where records were
needed for institutional memory purposes and used as knowledge resources.
However, recordkeeping requirements were simply not known about in the C3
community, and it was plainly a case in which the two communities of interest
didn't conceive that they had important common interests. Thus, it was also an
early example of ARM and IM&T organizations missing each other's boat at
the system design stage. This thinking during the emergence of digital systems
in the fifties and sixties created a mind set, especially in the IT community,
that continues today in many quarters that all records resulting from all
electronic systems are the ones maintained in paper form, not the ones in
digital form. Senior military officers and managers often view even so-called
mission critical information systems projects as computer projects or
information technology projects. They are too often seen as technical matters
for handling by technical staff in the IT department and not as projects that
support strategic aims and not as projects that manage valuable organizational
assets in the form of information. This is the first slip on a slippery slope,
which has resulted in improper identification of stakeholders and the
inadequate involvement of business and records management interests in system
design.
1970s: Distributed Office System
Participative Design Project. Word processing was first invented as a
mainframe computer application in the 1950s but didn't begin to catch on in a
big way until the late 1970s when dedicated electronic word processing
equipment came into wide usage to create documents on dedicated mini-computers
or stand-alone equipment rather than typewriters at the same time that
secretarial costs were on the rise. The central ‘word-processing pool’ served
the whole organization working in what would today be regarded as an electronic
sweatshop. In 1979, while serving in an operational position of an
international financial institution, I led a study of an organization of
several departments that serviced projects in about 20 countries. Since it was
clear that document creation and preparation were tasks that were subject to
differing individual work preferences, we undertook this study in a
participative manner involving team managers and related economic and financial
analysts, specialists of various disciplines and support staff. The conclusion was that
office technology should be fully decentralized to the unit level. Within a couple of years, the centralized WP
unit was disbanded.
The subsequent and more dramatic changes brought about by
the invention of the personal computer or ‘PC’ that began to become ubiquitous
in the early and mid-1980s changed the way computing power was distributed to
and within organizations, and the ways in which information was created and
used by individuals in carrying out their jobs – almost overnight. The use of
word processors and spreadsheet packages made it possible for professional
staff to create their own reports and statistical analyses without having to go
to a central typing pool or computer center, and ultimately to do so without
the assistance of the traditional secretary.
Ratios of secretarial support staff to principals/professionals changed.
Whereas knowledge-based or professional services organizations earlier might
have had secretary-to-principal ratios of 1:1 or 1:2, the trend soon changed
toward much lower ratios. Moreover, the nature of secretarial positions for
many of the survivors, except perhaps executive secretaries, changed in ways in
which they had much less to do with document creation and production (typing,
filing, copying, couriering to recipients, etc.) and more to do with other
kinds of administrative duties where they had, or were able to pick up, the
skills needed (budgeting, research, spreadsheet management, etc.) Changes in position descriptions and titles
to “administrative assistant,” “research assistant,” “budget assistant,” etc.,
reflected changing work patterns.
These shifts had important recordkeeping implications. The
secretary who previously had taken handwritten copy or dictation as the raw
documentation, and typed final versions of documents on rainbow carbon copies
saw to it that the original went to the recipient, the blue copy to the
circulation folder and the yellow copy to the central file center. This person
was also the gatekeeper for recordkeeping.
The secretary knew where a document stood in the production process,
sometimes almost invisibly, made the essential connection between the
document/record creator and the central recordkeeping system, kept the white
carbon copy, marked it with a file designation and placed it in the appropriate
unit file cabinet. In a broader sense, the same people were also the monitors
of the work processes that the documents and records were all about and knew
where the records points were. Where these support staff were replaced at all,
for reception duties, it was often by use of contingent staff not there long
enough to learn or care about recordkeeping policies or procedures, no matter
how up to date or well written they might be; nor was recordkeeping in their
job descriptions. By default, recordkeeping and work process monitoring fell to
the document creator. The conscientious among them would mark a copy of those
that were printed (not usually including email) for central files, but few
creators understood or fully took on the gatekeeper function or realized that
they were now the only link between the record and the recordkeeping
system. They were, as before,
recordmakers but not necessarily recordkeepers. The collective personal files
of these staff became more complete than the unit files but, alas, were not
generally accessible.
1980s: A Workplace Scenario for 10 Years Hence. In another
workplace project beginning in 1984, I proposed and was asked to prepare a
paper that would project ten years ahead what the organization’s workplace
might be like in 1995. Its purpose was to highlight linkages among services,
ensure needed integration in policy making and planning for human, facility and
information services, and to provide a basis for individual service unit
policymaking and detailed mid- and long-term planning. The paper, “A Scenario
for 1995,” was prepared in consultation with service managers and operational
sources and used a dozen mega-trends that were emerging in the mid-1980s as a
point of departure. The paper noted that:
·
incoming mail would be converted to digital form and
combined with related internally generated information to form complete
operational records;
·
all internal documents would be accessible in electronic
form, although paper records would have to be maintained because of the organization’s
requirement to be able to go to court if necessary in over 150 other countries
with different rules for evidence;
·
directives contained in various manuals would be issued and
accessed electronically;
·
greater integration of library and records management
services and systems;
·
important portions of the archives and records management
services would be decentralized to operational units along with other
administrative services (not policy making and operation of the archives;
·
there would be integration of data, text, image, audio and
video information processing, printing, library and records management
services.
Remarkably, with a couple of recordkeeping exceptions, most
of the Scenario came to pass by around 1995.
Two years later in 1987, I became chief of information services that
included the ARM functions and took measures to bring the separate library and
ARM units closer together by inviting library staff to participate in joint
meetings and training and by fostering of cross hiring. This did not work out
because of differences in grade levels between librarians and recordkeeping
positions brought about largely by persistent disparities in job description
educational requirements and actual educational levels of employees. Common
library/ARM information retrieval software was not adopted because IR needs
differed. While some ARM functions were decentralized, others became (wisely in
retrospect) more centralized. While the projections that were made were
generally on target, there were equally or more important projections that
weren’t made that had enormous impact on patterns of work and recordkeeping
that are still thorns in our sides, chiefly the failure to project the
incredible change that electronic communications in the form of distributed
facsimiles and email would bring to the workplace. Even as late as 1988, in a
survey of IT managers in UN organizations, the expectation was that facsimile
usage (still thinking of a central system in the communications department)
would likely increase a small amount over the next few years and email usage
would perhaps increase 3x or 4x. A follow-up survey in 1991 revealed that,
because of the rapid decentralization of facsimiles to the unit level, usage
increased over 400%. Email usage had increase over 1000%.[12]
Enormous usage has since been made of email for carrying out substantive work.
Facsimile (incoming) and email continue to be the bane of most ARM
professionals. We can anticipate similar problems, only worse, as business
uptake instant messaging technology.
1980s-1990s: Business Systems Analysis and
Macro-Appraisal. The 80s marked some other sea changes in orientation that
would become much more pronounced in the 1990s in the form of increasing use of
business systems analysis and information engineering tools. Business systems
analysis (BSA) involves identifying broad organizational purposes and goals,
supporting business areas and processes, BP definition and decomposition to
sub-processes where necessary, and the development of improved processes and
information architectures. (A processes is "a set of activities that,
taken together, produce a result of value to a customer”[13]
– i.e., internal or external ‘customer’.) It helps to rationally link all these
things and to drive systems development of supporting information technology
architectures. Through the use of BSA, it is possible to link any asset,
including records, to organizational goals.
Moreover, it makes great recordkeeping sense to ensure that core and
support BPs do in fact produce the necessary records to give evidence to their
having been carried out in a manner that can be faithfully and intelligently
reproduced in the future. As greater portions of organizational records assets
are maintained in digital form, BSA also offers a great tool for implementing
computer-assisted macro-appraisal of records – i.e., the processes by which the
value of whole groups of records related by virtue of the BPs that produce them
are assessed and the corresponding schedules for their temporary or continuing
retention are assigned.
A BSA project is not something to be undertaken lightly or
without executive air cover. However, if even one process-oriented system can
be identified that creates records of such a nature as to make macro-appraisal
at the process or system level feasible, it can be a much simpler task and will
be a good way to gain experience in computer-assisted macro-appraisal. One of
the great advantages of such a top-down functional or process-level
macro-appraisal approach[14],
is that BPs and sub-processes are usually much more stable than organizations.
The human resources department may be reorganized three or four times in a
decade. The underlying processes that HR departments support, however, often
with the involvement of other organizations, tend to remain constant despite
such reorganizations: recruit employees; hire employees; place employees; train
employees; terminate employees; establish benefits plans; formulate/issue
policy, etc. Moreover, appraising at the BP level provides the basis for
identifying and assessing records up front, even before creation, not
after-the-fact when they arrive in the archives often years after creation,
when we don’t even know whether we have the really valuable records or not.[15]
Thus, appraising by process/sub-process both gives us a more stable
information, records and other asset management platform and offers an
opportunity to put technology to work in support of recordkeeping functions.
There are process-related and technological limitations to how much an
organization can employ automated disposition management with its records; but
for that portion of its records that are amenable to this approach, it can
offer a very effective tool in the recordkeeping arsenal.
During the 80s and early 90s, the author had the good
fortune to lead or serve on three BSA project teams at various organizational
levels, including the whole-organization level. The methodologies used were
precursors to the business process reengineering (BPR) methodologies and
computer-based tools widely used today to substantially change how work is
done. Information management (IM)
skills, with information engineering and data administration tools, were used
to create information architectures related to BPs to promote optimal
information sharing and usage. IM, as distinct from IT, involves designing and
implementing enterprise information directories that rationalize and make it
easy for users to discover, access and use divergent multimedia information
stores. The design of corporate filing schemes is one of the oldest forms of
IM. As part of these projects, corporate BP definitions were developed. Later
we made use of the updated definitions to create a ‘provenance database’ that
was used for macro-appraisal purposes. The experience demonstrated that records
could be linked to business aims in a related provenance database through BPs,
and be appraised before and upon their creation.
Lessons Learned Traveling Down the Garden
Path
·
Writing is a
technology for producing records that we have learned to deal with, but this
doesn’t mean we should confine recordkeeping practices to traditional writing
technology.
·
The
introduction of electronic records does not appear to have changed, in
fundamental ways the underlying meaning of "recordness," at least not
yet; however, the field of documentation that is recordworthy is becoming much
richer and more challenging with emerging multimedia and hypermedia
"documents". The ways in which records are manifested are changing
dramatically, largely due to a seemingly ever-increasing number and variety of
recordmaking technologies that are not recordkeeping technologies and the
transformation of the workplace and work patterns. These changes will govern
how organizations will have to conduct recordkeeping.
·
Macro-level
forces such as great historical events and lesser-noticed legislation can have
enormous trickle-down impact on local work patterns, technology and
organizational behavior. They may provide early warning to changes in the ways
information and records will be created and used. Current examples of U. S.
legislation include: the state-level Uniform Electronic Transaction Act (UETA)
that legitimizes electronic records and Uniform Computer Information Transaction
Act (UCITA) that governs licensing of software and information services;
Federal E-Sign legislation that legitimizes electronic signatures; the Federal
Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA) that directs Federal agencies to
position themselves to conduct key direct citizen electronic interactions by
2003; and similar ‘literary warrants’[16]
at state and local levels. Similar warrants have been or are being undertaken
in other countries, e.g., Australia, Canada, U. K and EU. We can anticipate
that these and other such laws that may be at odds with one another will govern
international transactions. In the absence of any concerted effort on the parts
of national professional associations, lawyers who may have little or no
background in recordkeeping are writing these laws. In the case of UETA,
attorneys created a definition for “record” that I doubt is acceptable to many
ARM professionals.
·
Rightly or
wrongly, ARM professionals, in their understandable interest in solving
recordkeeping issues before technology is introduced, often come across as
anti-technology, anti-progress, pro-paper forces. This has not helped essential
integration of recordkeeping with information management and technology
developments. ARM professionals should become positive agents of change by
ensuring that these developments preserve sound recordkeeping practices; but
they should not attempt, or be seen to attempt, to govern the type or uptake of
technological innovation.
·
Business
systems modeling can provide an excellent basis for developing provenance
databases and for implementing up-front macro-appraisal of records.
·
We should be
careful to take account of differences in national heritage and culture and not
simply to be swept up by what is regarded as success somewhere else. Variances
between the Canadian 'total archives' approach as contrasted with the 'public
archives' approach of other countries are illustrative of this point. The use
of IT is even more subject to human factors and cultural issues. Having noted
the importance of cultural differences, there should also be no reluctance to
seriously consider practices of other organizations, localities, states,
provinces or countries in advancing the aims of good recordkeeping and
international standards. Individual theorists and practitioners and the
national archives in many countries – especially but not only America,
Australia and Canada – have contributed much that has been adopted or adapted
for use in other countries. Much collaboration has been done at the
international level including such efforts as the United Nations study, Managing
Electronic Records: Issues and Guidelines, (1990) and the recent and
ongoing ISO-sponsored development of an international standard for
recordkeeping (ISO 15489) that was based on a standard developed in Australia
(AS 4390). ISO15489 is an excellent standard for recordkeeping practices; but
is at too high a level of abstraction to certify trustworthy recordkeeping EDMS
and other software applications. The U.S. DoD 5015.2 Records Management Application
standard[17], approved
by the Archivist of the U.S. for use throughout the Federal Government, and
widely used voluntarily at state and local levels and in the private sector and
academia, can and is being used to certify such applications. A similar
international standard at this level is badly needed to gain the needed support
of software developers. This is more important than ever. We need the
collaboration of software developers to make it happen.
·
There is much to be gained by keeping a weather eye on
worldwide research in areas not always apparently of potential interest or
application to the ARM field. Especially research and development in new
writing technologies and natural language processing have significant potential
recordkeeping implications. Innovations may seem trivial when first revealed.
Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are not, or they are simply years ahead of
the times and will become widely used when the time is right. It may be
difficult to always sort out correctly which is which. We shouldn’t dismiss
possible futures but give thought to how we might accommodate them if they do
materialize.
Fast Forwarding the Future
We could talk more about relatively short-term projections
for emerging technologies fairly safely – wireless appliances, natural language
interfaces, tablet computers, agent technology, new kinds of non-digital
computers, etc. – all of which have important potential recordkeeping
implications. Experience has taught me that projecting such advances much
beyond the next few years is not likely to be very useful.[18] Let me cite as an example a 1985 prediction
by Paul Strassman about the information world in 2000:
There will be a lot of paper in use in
the year 2000. There will be more of it, per capita, than at present because
there will be so many more originals from which copies can be made. The
information workforce will be more than twice the present size...The quality of
electronic printing -- incorporating color, graphic designs, and pictures --
will make this means of communication attractive to use. The
"intelligence” of printing and composing machines will be of a
sufficiently high order to cope with the enormous variety of electronic forms
in which originals will be represented. All of this assumes that the present
sociopolitical hurdles preventing the exchange of electronically communicated
text will be resolved through international standards...we should expect to see
the same progress...which now permits home-to-home dialing around the globe. Paper
will not be used for archival storage of routine business records. [Emphasis
supplied.] Optical recording... provides a much better means for the filing of
information. Paper will be used for reading, due to its greater human
compatibility. [19]
Although most of
Strassman’s predictions materialized, obviously the one on archival storage has
a long way to go. This is not because of any failed prediction on the
technology side, but rather because most ARM organizations have either failed
to make the business case for electronic records management or have not had the
appetite to see in technology solutions beyond the problems. Either way it
illustrates that forecasting can be complicated and risky. We had better design
our information architectures, enterprise networks and electronic document and
records management systems to recognize and facilitate future change, e.g.,
through the use of such strategies as open systems architectures, object
oriented systems, portable document formats, and application-independent
multimedia data bases and workable international standards for
recordkeeping[20]. To perform our work in ways that will reduce
overall organizational stress and minimize information management including
recordkeeping costs, we must be sensitive observers of shifting workpatterns
and technological innovation and skilled at spotting their potential
recordkeeping implications. We would, nonetheless, be wise to design today’s
systems to accommodate, or adapt to, unpredictable future changes in the way
businesses, governments and academic institutions will operate and document
their operations rather than try to figure out today what those changes will
be.
Globalization creates
demands and opportunities – and technology provides tools – to make it possible
for vastly more use of archival assets worldwide, something every ARM
professional and association should promote.
Especially in the rapidly developing global world of e-commerce,
e-government and e-records, there are great new opportunities to foster human
interaction within nations and among and between developed and developing
countries to promote the protection of human rights, improved human and
inter-governmental relationships and other important uses of archival assets.
We should not squander those opportunities.
© 2002 Richard E. Barry
[1] W. J. Ong, S.J., Orality and Literacy, (New York and London: Routledge, 1982; Reprinted 1993), in a chapter on “Writing restructures
consciousness,” pp. 82-83.
[2] M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record:
England 1066-1307 (London: Blackwell,
Oxford , 1993), 118.
[3] Ibid,
p. 119.
[4] Steven Levy, “Bill Gates Says, Take This Tablet,” Newsweek,
April 30, 2001. <www.msnbc.com/news/562422.asp>
[5] The author encourages readers to personally engage
themselves in professional or activist groups, beyond traditional archival and
records management organizations, that concern themselves with the social
impact of technology. Many professional organizations have working groups
dedicated to this subject, including ACM
<www.acm.org>,ALA<www.ala.org>, IEEE <www.ieee.org> and SIM
<www.simnet.org> to mention a few. Other non-profit advocacy
organizations have been established specifically for this purpose, e.g.,
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. CPSR <www.cpsr.org> is a nonprofit, public interest
organization that addresses benefits and risks to society resulting from the
use of computers. It is financed mainly by dues from an increasingly international
membership base of professionals in the information management and information
technology field. Still others, such as EPIC <www.epic.org> are
single-issue organizations, in this case privacy issue.
[6] ARM is used here as a generic term to embrace all of archives and records management. In some cultures, the terms ‘archivist’ and ‘records manager’ and their functions are seen as redundant because they are traditionally integrated. Despite fairly recent efforts to the contrary, in U.S and elsewhere, considerable distinctions are still maintained and are evident in the work experience, duties, professional association affiliations and educational levels of practitioners.
[7]
Ian Wilson, “Toward a Vision of Information Management in the
Federal Government,” Address presented at a Canadian Records Management
Institute seminar, November, 10, 1999,
<www.rmicanada.com/seminar/wilsonspeech_e.htm>
[8] For further discussion of TCO and recordkeeping implications, see “Catching Up with the Last Technology Train at the Next Station” on the author’s website at <http://rbarry.com/febrb2.html>
[9] <www.lis.pitt.edu/~cerar/er-mtg97.html>
[10] CPSR, an group of computer professionals (see earlier footnote) has a great motto: “Question technology!”
[11]
Obviously other personal
experiences contributed to the assessments in this chapter than those related
here. Other such experiences are reflected in other papers I have authored,
many of which are accessible electronically at including “The Changing
Workplace and the Nature of the Record,” the original paper on this subject
that was presented at the Association of Canadian Archivists in Regina in 1995,
and others are located in the Other Papers and Recent Papers sections of
<www.rbarry.com> and in the writings of other authors in which projects I
have led were used as case examples, e.g.: “Implementation of Imaging
Technology for Recordkeeping at the World Bank,” by Clive D. Smith, Bulletin
of the American Society for Information Science, June/July 1997, p.25,
including a summary of my study evaluation of the Bank’s Integrated Records and
Information Services (IRIS) system against the University of Pittsburgh
Functional Requirements for Evidence in Recordkeeping; "Real Problems,
Real Solutions" by Bronwyn Friar in PC
WORLD, September, 1993, pp. 35-39, article about work on human factors,
environmental and facilities related information management projects; Silicon
Jungle by David Rothman, Ballantine
Books, New York, 1985, the “Hal Syndrome” chapter; Management of Electronic Records: Issues and Guidelines, a
report prepared by a UN Technical Panel on Electronic Records Management, under
the chairmanship of R.E. Barry, World Bank, UN Sales Number GV.E.89.0.15, N.Y.,
1990; Office Automation: Jekyll or Hyde? by Daniel Marschall and Judith
Gregory, Working Women Education Fund, Cleveland OH, 1983, chapter on
"Staff Participation in Office Systems: Two Case Studies at the World
Bank".
[12] See discussion of this subject in Managing Organisations with Electronic Records,” by R. E. Barry at <www.caldeson.com/RIMOS/barry2.html>.
[13] Hammer, Michael and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A manifesto for business revolution, Harper Business, NY, 1993, p.3.
[14] I am reluctant to use the term ‘functional analysis’, because I still find ARM professionals who equate function directly to a single organization, whereas here we are speaking to processes that often involve multiple organizations. I believe that most professionals regard functional appraisal to mean the latter.
[15] As noted by Karl Lawrence, a key member the team that developed the BP-based, macro-appraisal approach, in a personal email dated 6/6/2001 1:47:31 PM EDT: “With limited resources at hand and understanding that records are not all of equal value, we felt that a new approach to appraisal was needed…to spend what few resources and time we had on the things that had truly ongoing value. Thus, under the new approach, the appraisal of specific bodies of records held in individual offices became a second order activity. The first order activity was determining the "importance" of each high level business processes that might produce records in multiple units throughout the organization.”
[16] The terms literary warrant and warrant are used here to generically designate various mandates for recordkeeping including legislation, regulation, professional best practices, etc. The concept was well developed as part of the University of Pittsburgh Function Requirements project. <www.sis.pitt.edu/~nhprc/warrant_audits.html> by Wendy Duff <duff@fis.utoronto.ca>.
[17] See the standard, related functional requirements and certified software at <http://jitc.fhu.disa.mil/recmgt/>.
[18] For those readers interested in long-term predictions about technology and its impact on society, see The Age of Spiritual Machines ,by Ray Kurzweil, Viking, N.Y., 1999, ISBN 0-670-88217-8, especially the “TimeLine” section pp. 261-280.
[19] Strassmann, Paul A. Information Payoff: The Transformation of work in the Electronic Age, The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan, N. Y., 1985, pp. 176-7.
[20] “The Changing Workplace and the Nature of the Record,” presented at the Association of Canadian Archivists in Regina in 1995, accessible at <www.rbarry.com/ACA-PV16/ACA-PV16.html>