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Debates on SharePoint at the 2008 RMS conference

I was one of the facilitators at a collaborative session at the 2008 Records Management Society looking at the future of electronic records management.

I asked the group the following question:

which will be more influential by the year 2012:  SharePoint or EDRMS (Electronic Document and Records Management Systems)?

A minority thought that EDRMS would be more influential because SharePoint does not have full records management functionality.  The majority thought that SharePoint would be more influential.  They thought organisations would implement it regardless of the relative weakness of its records management functionality, because of:

• Microsoft's entrenched relationships with IT departments in most organisations
• Microsoft's willingness to incentivise organisations to take it up by bundling SharePoint up with other products and upgrades
• The fact that SharePoint can do many more things than just manage records and hence will appeal to different interests within the organisation:  even if a records manager rejects SharePoint it may be advocated and procured by their Head of Communications, or a Knowledge Manager or an intranet manager.

Records managers would face two challenges with SharePoint:

• the first challenge would be as a profession, to influence Microsoft to add records management functionality. 
• The second would be to get their own organisations to take seriously the issues of governance and records management within SharePoint implementations.  The group thought this was the stiffer of the two challenges because many SharePoint implementations will be driven from a non-records management agenda. In contrast Steve Bailey thought that the interest other information professionals showed in SharePoint was an advantage to records managers when compared with EDRM which sometimes failed to engage the interest of non-records managers.

There was a debate about the future of EDRM suppliers.  Some felt that their market would be squeezed because many organisations would think that SharePoint, despite its records management weaknesses, did enough for them to get buy without EDRMS.  Others thought that there was a role for EDRMS either plugged into SharePoint, or instead of SharePoint, for orgniasations who wanted stricter RM disciplines than SharePoint supports.  Tony Hendley of Cimtech said that he thought that EDRM suppliers had always had to adapt themselves to the general desktop environments and would evolve products that fitted the SharePoint environment.

On the following day Roger Smethurst presented on DEFRA's implementation of, and customisation of, SharePoint (I've blogged on a similar presentation by Roger here). Roger said Microsoft had shown great interest in the customisations that DEFRA had made to SharePoint for records management purposes.  He had gone over to Seattle at Microsoft's invitation and they had discussed the possibility of incorporating some of them into future releases.

Roger Smethurst said that he was broadly happy with his SharePoint implementation.  The biggest frustration he had was the lack of integration between Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint.  There is no simple direct way for a colleague to save an e-mail into SharePoint.  Roger ascribes this to the way Microsoft is set up as an organisation. The division of Microsoft responsible for developing Outlook has its own strategy and roadmap, that sits completely seperately from the development of the rest of the Microsoft product range. 

Trends and priorities in legal KM…

…was the topic of conversation at the first TFPL Connect Law Special Interest Group meeting last week.  Special Interest Groups run alongside the main TFPL Connect programme and offer members interested in a particular topic or sector an opportunity to discuss matters of interest and network with colleagues.  Attendees discussed current trends and issues in legal KM and agreed the agenda for the remaining three meetings for the year.  Next up on 2nd July the group will tackle the topic of ‘the dream know how system’.

Interested in becoming a member? Please click here to apply for TFPL Connect membership online.

An Insider's view of the Information Tribunal

The Information Tribunal is the final point of appeal against decisions made by the Information Commissioner on the following types of cases:

• Freedom of Information (FOI)
• Environmental Information Regulations (EIR)
• Data Protection
• Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations.

Decisions made by the Information Tribunal can be appealed to the High Court, but only on a point of law.

Paul Taylor is a lay member of the Information tribunal.  He also has a full time post as Information Policy Manager for Education Leeds.  Last night I heard him give a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of the Information Tribunal in his talk to the Records Management Society's London Group.

The tribunal hears around 130 cases per year. The vast majority of these are FOI and EIR cases.  Currently it is hearing cases arising from FOI/EIR requests made in late 2005.  The main reason for the backlog is that the Office the Information Commissioner's Office in Wilmslow has insufficient staffing to promptly process the vast volume of appeals against rejected FOI requests.  Some requestors give up their appeal in frustration at the length of time it takes to process the appeal.

The Information Tribunal has a sectretariat (based in Leicester) that arranges services for each hearing.  The tribunals themselves are drawn from a pool of chairs (who are legally qualified) and lay members (practioners who have experience of working with information rights law).  Each tribunal consists of three people:  a chair and two lay members.

At most hearings the person who made the original FOI/EIR request represents themselves.  In contrast both the Information Commissioner (against whose decision the appeal is being brought) and the public authority that is the subject of the request, are represented by experienced Counsel.  Paul felt that despite the imbalance in experience between the requestor and the counsels representing the other parties, requestors often acquitted themselves suprisingly well in front of the tribunal. 

The tribunal is relatively formal in its proceedings.  The room is set out like a courtroom, the three person tribunal sits on a raised platform, and the court is asked to rise when the tribunal members walk into the court.  There is a concern that this formality may be off-putting to requestors representing themselves, and the Tribunal is looking at ways of ensuring it's procedings are as requestor friendly as possible.

Procedings are open to the public to attend.  Occasionally parts of the hearing have to be heard behind closed doors (or example when the public authority is questioned on the actual information that has been requested and that they think is exempt from release under FOI).

The Tribunal has some strong powers: it can ask the Information Commissioner to assess the records management practice of an organisation if it appears that poor records management has affected its ability to meet its Freedom of Information obligations.

Lay membership of the Information Tribunal is a significant time commitment (the time necessary to read all the papers, attend the hearing and input into the decisions). The work is renumerated and expenses are paid.  Most lay members find time from the holiday/flexitime entitlements of their full time jobs.  Once you are appointed a lay member your tenure lasts until the age of 70.

Paul loves being a lay member of the Information tribunal and would recommend any FOI practioner to apply should the Information Tribunal advertise any lay member vacancies.  Being a lay member had broadened his horizons, allowed him to work on high profile cases such as the Iraq Weapons of Mass destruction Case and to contribute to setting precedents in Freedom of Information Case Law.

RMS Conference 2008: the spectres haunting records management

Steve Bailey opened the 2008 Records Management Society Conference by conjuring  up three spectres to strike  fear into the hearts of the assembled records management professionals

1. The spectre of the next generation of young people to hit the workplace, steeped in web 2; weaned on Facebook,Bebo, myspace; used to tagging their photos and videos and Flickr and You tube .  Steve's prediction:  they won't adopt the classification structures, metadata rules and retention schedules that form the traditional records management toolkit.
2. The spectre of free software provided and hosted via the web.   Software like Google apps, which allows individuals and/or teams to opt out of using their organisation's records systems by providing a ready made alternative for creating,  sharing and storing documents.  Steve's predictions:  the era of forcing people to use the systems we want them to use are over.  If organisations block the next generation's access to the sites that they spend half their life on, they will walk to other workplaces.
3. The spectre of cloud computing:  companies like Amazon and Google offering organisations near unlimited server space, and hosting their e-mail accounts and information systems via the web.  Steve's prediction:   there will be no incentive for organisations to apply retention schedules when they don't bear the cost of purchasing and maintaining their servers

Steve gave a call to arms to the profession:  keep the timeless objectives and goals of records management, but ditch the tools and methods you currently use, tools forged in a different era, the hard copy era.   He charactised methods such as retention schedules and distinctions between records and documents as being too time consuming to scale up to the  exploding volumes of information unleashed by the onset of the world wide web, e-mail and office networks.

Steve advocated that the profession should try to harness to records management methods that have been used succesfully on the web; methods that we know are acceptable to the web2 generation and can cope with huge volumes of information.  One such idea was to allow users of documents and records to tag them and/or rate them:  this would

• help the individual user to get back in future to that document,
• provides a route for others to find and better understand the document/record
• add to the knowledge that the organisation has of its own information, how it is used, and its relative importance

Steve did not pretend that his ideas on how to harness web 2 are fully thought through solutions: at this stage he is proposing it as a field for further discussion and investigation. This is still blue skies thinking and it isn't easy at this point in time for any records manager to integrate these insights into their daily practice. 

Steve's talk was well received:  he is a forthright, entertaining but thoughtful and reasoned speaker, and his blog RM futurewatch is the best and most widely read blog in the records management world.  But at this point in time most records managers are reporting that their organisations do not want their staff to use Google apps/Google docs; do not want to outsource their servers, and are happy to block access to sites such as facebook if they are overused. 

The big question is will organisations be able to hold to this line as time moves on?  What if applications like Facebook/Google docs start to take root as environments in which people from different organisations can co-operate and share knowledge with each other?  Will organisations find that they are missing out on so much information and communication that they suffer more from blocking access than they would from living with the consequences of their staff using them?

Where is data protection going?

This week, TFPL hosted the latest CiG seminar Data Protection - is it really possible or just a pipe-dream?  There were presentations from Jonathan Holbrook, the Head of Data Protection Practice Private Sector at the Information Commissioner's Office and Sunny Bath, the Data Protection Officer at Euromoney Institutional Investor (EII).   Martin Sanderson, from our Records Management Team, attended and reports below:

"When attending a Data Protection meeting in Europe in 2007 I was surprised to hear that the UK was reported as the weakest European member in implementing DP with Spain the strongest.  Perhaps Jonathan provided the answer to this position in explaining the lack of ICO’s enforcement powers or indeed the lack of interest by the press (for their own reasons) to push this as a key public issue.

However I was encouraged on hearing how seriously EII has taken Data Protection, and the level of effort and investment they have put into this over the years.  Their starting point was to carry out a thorough audit of the personal information they were holding across the organisation.  I wonder how many other organisations have even taken this first step in bringing their management of personal information under control. Recent events in the UK suggest there is a long way to go but until we witness a stronger enforcement regime in the UK I cannot see this happening".

See more about this event on Fenton Research blog 'But why do you need to know?'

My notes from TFPL's SharePoint conference

Val has spent the last month fending off phone calls, e-mails, texts and bended knee entreaties from people pleading to be given a precious ticket to TFPL’s SharePoint conference.

The big day finally arrived: Tuesday April 1 2008.  The 140 seat Sir Henry Wellcome Auditorium was packed out all day.

It didn’t disappoint. The speakers gave a great overview of what organizations in the UK are doing with SharePoint, and the opportunities and issues presented by what looks like becoming an all pervasive information environment.

Here are the notes I tapped (as quietly as I could) into my little Asus Eee pc, as I listened to the speakers

WHERE HAS SHAREPOINT COME FROM AND WHERE IS IT GOING? Jeremy Bentley, CEO SmartLogic

How Microsoft’s rivalry with Google has influenced SharePoint’s development
The first release of SharePoint, was simply aiming to replace the shared drive.  After several iterations, and huge investment, it is now aiming for much more than that:  a genuine enterprise information platform.

The difference between the second release, in 2003, and MOSS 2007 is $800 million of development.  Most of this massive development spend went on improving the search facility. This was prompted by the threat to Microsoft posed by Google's move into corporate market.

Gartner said that the main fault of the earlier versions of SharePoint was the poor quality of its search functionality.  Microsoft  had not put significant resources into the search features because they didn’t regard Google as a threat.  Google was concentrating on search in the world wide web, rather than inside organizations.

The enterprise search market has until recently been dominated by Autonomy, Endeca and Fast: three relatively small companies.  Google was the first of the big boys to enter the enterprise search market. Google's enterprise search offering was radically simpler, cheaper and quicker to implement than its competitors.  Implementing Autonomy involves nine months of building taxonomies and developing teaching scripts and training the Autonomy tool.  Implementing Google's enterprise search tools takes one afternoon. 

There is no way that companies the size of  Autonomy, Endeca and Fast could compete with Google.  Google's R and D spend per year is bigger than the combined market value of all of these companies.  Once Google went into the Search market then other big boys piled in:  IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

Search is the new portal for individuals into their information world.  On the web people use the Google search interface and never bother with any classifications or metadata fields.  They expect the same inside their organization.  MOSS 2007 is the first SharePoint release to address the search requirement of people in modern organizations.

What is missing from MOSS 2007?
SharePoint does not have support for:

• classification
• taxonomy and ontology
• metadata integration
• guided navigation

SharePoint only supports controlled vocabularies in the form of flat-lists.  Information scientists within Microsoft lost the battle to support multi-level taxonomies because of the focus on improving search.

SharePoint as an enterprise information platform
The addition of enterprise search functionality means that SharePoint can claim to provide an all embracing information platform, spanning the gap between the (Microsoft) operating system and the Microsoft Office tools (Word, Outlook, Excel) that people use to create and receive information.  It fills the gap by providing the collaboration environment people need to work with each other, and a search portal which the organization can shine over as many of its content repositories as it wishes

Massive Growth of SharePoint
Microsoft  claims to have sold 100million SharePoint client licenses worldwide. Even if only one tenth of these is being used that is still massive

SHAREPOINT FOR RECORDS MANAGEMENT  Case study, DEFRA, Roger Smethurst, Head of Information and Records Management

DEFRA’s decision not to go ahead with EDRM
In 2005 DEFRA launched a 500 user pilot of a National Archives approved EDRM system. They decided not to go ahead with the implementation which would have cost £1,000 per user per year.

They looked again at their requirements and decided that:

• Helping colleagues collaborate was a key requirement
• DEFRA didn’t need their system to meet the whole of the National Archives statement of functional requirements for ERM.  They whittled the TNA requirements down to two pages of A4 to focus on what they really needed.
• They would use as much software already in DEFRA, or already purchased, as possible
• They wouldn't go for a one size fits all approach:  if a case management system was working well, DEFRA are happy for people to keep records in that system.
• They would aim to provide colleagues with the tools they need to collaborate, and then build ways of harvesting records from those collaborative environments. 

Customisation of SharePoint to meet records retention requirements

• SharePoint is based on sites:  ‘my sites’ for individuals, ‘team sites’ as a shared collaborative space with colleagues.  Retention schedules cannot be applied to records in team sites,  but documents can be moved to  ‘records centre’ sites where retention rules can be applied. 
• Out of the box MOSS 2007 provides a router to move documents needed as records from a team site to a records centre.  But it leaves a copy in the team site, causing problems of duplication and confusion over what is the official version.
• Defra developed their own customisation: when a document is moved to a records centre a link is left behind in the team site, but no actual copy of the document.  This means that people can still access the document from the team site but they are accessing the record copy in the records centre.

Customisation of sharepoint to accommodate a fileplan structure

• MOSS 2007 does not include the ability to apply a fileplan.  DEFRA have included the fileplan path in the URL of each team site.  They have customized SharePoint to harvest the information included in the URL of each team site and include it in the metadata of records that originated from that site

Governance of team sites within SharePoint

• If you don't control the implementation you get  'SharePoint sprawl’, so many team sites you don't know what to do with them.
• Power users can set up team sites and chose a structure for the team site.  They need to talk to records managers when they set it up to decide where it sits within the SharePoint structure.
• Defra set up an Information Architecture Board, chaired by Roger, to oversee the growth of the system.

USING SHAREPOINT TO SIMPLIFY THE LANDSCAPE  Learning and Skills Council case study:   John Quinn (DCFS) and Alexis Castillo Soto (LSC)

In LSC  MOSS 2007 provides  one enterprise search across the LSC intranet, legacy shared drives, SharePoint team sites and SharePoint my sites. All of these areas are simply viewed as SharePoint libraries.  It has made it far easier for colleagues to understand the information picture within LSC.

LSC have taken off the administration rights that users by default are given over their 'my site'.  This is because with admin rights users can:

• add web-parts which are prone to fall over,increasing the support requirement
• create team workspaces underneath their my site which are invisible to the organisation

USING SHAREPOINT FOR COLLABORATION:  KPMG case study,  Ceri Hughes 

• Use of 'my site' is an important part of the implementation.  An individual's my site functions as their equivalent of a people directory entry, enabling others to find them and find out about them.  It also functions as their window out on the rest of KPMG, they can set up RSS feeds to resources inside SharePoint and beyond, and set up links to key people they want to network with
• Colleagues want an equivalent of Google:  Now SharePoint offers one search over many different content repositories instead of separate search engines.
• Big generation divide:  younger 'generation Y' colleagues are asking for blogs, wikis and to set up Facebook groups, others are suspicious or nervous of these tools
• Internal blogs and podcasts have significantly raised the visibility of leadership figures in KPMG
• Managing expectations is important.   Allowing people to use wikis doesn't mean that we will get a KPMG equivalent of wikipedia in six months time!
• Tried to use it out of the box ( so able to upgrade easily to service pack 2),  but the interface was too simple and therefore KPMG have customised it.
• Without governance around setting up of team sites it can get quickly out of control
• Migrating legacy Sharepoint 2003 into the MOSS 2007 has not proved as easy as one might suppose

USING SHAREPOINT AS AN INTERNET Steven Buckley, Christian Aid

• Christian Aid did not waste time and  money rebranding SharePoint (after all it is only an application, and you don't rebrand Word or Outlook)
• Using SharePoint for their intranet, and as a collaboration system
• When deciding the  structure of team sites they didn't show people SharePoint. Instead they just asked people what they wanted to store, how they wanted to find it and what communications feature they wanted in their collaborative enviroment.
• Two years ago Demos wrote a report on 'De-organisation' a term for the phenomenon whereby the links that tie staff to the organisation are weakened through practices like remote working. To de-organise successfully organisations need to create alternative sources of stability and certainty. A collaboration system could be that source of certainty.  A collaboration system is of even more importance to a remote worker than  to a deskbound officer.
• It was important that SharePoint wasn't seen as yet another place to store things, that it is seen as reducing the number of places things are stored.  The day a team was trained on SharePoint its network drives were turned off, with the content already having been migrated to SharePoint.
• People can elect to join specific audiences and communities.  This drives the type of content that is pushed out to them, and even what you see on the intranet home page.  People can subscribe to alerts from other sites so they keep abreast of what interests them.
• Each team has a blog, they are encouraged to put up news and comments on their team blogs as they occur to them.  The central communications teams subscribes to all these feeds from each team and can pick up on stories that are of interest to the whole organisation.
• Internal podcasts and live staff radio broadcasts of meetings have cut down the need to attend meetings and briefings in person.
• Christian Aid decomissioned the line of business system they used to run their multi-million pound grant programme.  They are now managing the process from an application built in SharePoint, saving money on licence fees and maintenance agreements.
• Vendor management is important: always make an effort to understand the road map of your vendor.  Christian Aid make great efforts to be a global reference site for Microsoft and in return they have worked with us to meet our requirements.
• They encourage staff to use Facebook, and to set up Facebook groups with each other.  There are lots of Facebook links around the Christian Aid intranet.
• They kept customisation to an absolute minimum (five minor customisations) in order to make the upgrade path as simple as possible. 

CONCLUSIONS FROM THE DAY  Adrian Dale (Senior Advisor, TFPL)

The speakers have shown the many applications of MOSS 2007 including its uses:

• as a communications tool
• as a document repository
• as a collaboration environment
• for alerting people to new documentation or news of interest to them
• an applications platform:  strip out other systems, reduce number of systems by developing new applications within SharePoint rather than bringing in new systems

Connecting people to people is just as important as connecting people to information. For a lot of organisations 'people finder' is the  killer application of the SharePoint suite:  it is effectively an out of the box people directory. 

For the first time collaborative software looks like becoming a standard part of everyone's desktop. 

Very heavy document centric processes still need industrial strength document management systems. Pharmaceutical, Legal, and some parts of government all continue to need these.  But a great many other organizations may find that most of their knowledge workers do not want or need this strength of system, and can get along better with a well managed SharePoint environment.   

Sharepoint: a viewpoint from IT directors

Charles Christian has posted onto  The Orange Rag a summary of a round table discussion between IT directors of Law firms  on SharePoint.  See Charles' post for the full summary, but below I have grouped together some of the points that most interested me:

What is SharePoint?

• Sharepoint is still perceived as all things to all men -what exactly is your firm trying to achieve and do with Sharepoint?
• Microsoft defined SharePoint as an Information Management Platform – it is a toolset with which a firm can create a multitude of applications.

SharePoint's phenomenal growth

• From Microsoft’s perspective Sharepoint is their number one business application in terms of sales, with over 100 million Sharepoint licenses, that’s one in 20 MS licensed PCs in the world using  Sharepoint!

Impact of SharePoint on the vendor market

• Some felt quite strongly that Sharepoint is and will continue to enable them to reduce the number of bespoke and niche applications they need.
  It was generally agreed that the vendors to have/are/will suffer from SharePoint are: 1) Portal vendors 2) Web Content Management solutions 3) Workflow solutions
• One prominent IT Director guaranteed that in 5 years there would be no Document management Systems (DMS) as we know it today instead this would all be done through and using Sharepoint.  Neil Cameron Predicated that fairly soon any enterprise portal/intranet will be run with Sharepoint

I like the point about SharePoint being all things to all men:  it has for example driven a coach and horses through the distinction between an intranets and a document management system.  I worked for one organisation which was rolling out a document management system for colleagues to store their working documents,  whilst replacing its intranet with SharePoint.  Pretty soon they realised that by giving every team the ability to create sites on SharePoint they were in effect rolling out two document management systems at the same time.

Google vs Microsoft: Google Sites vs SharePoint

In February 2008 Google launched the latest addtion to their Google Apps suite:     Google Sites.  It has been dubbed as Google's answer to Microsoft SharePoint:  an application that allows teams  and workgroups to create collaborative sites to share information and documents. 

Google are allowing any individual to create a Google Sites application for their organisation for free, and in minutes.   Google's hope is that the application will then spread virally within the organisation, as that individual invites other colleagues to join and collaborate with them.   

Google are by-passing IT departments, hoping that teams impatient with their organisation's systems will jump ship to Google Sites.

However Google are offering IT departments a way back into the loop.  Once a Google Sites application has reached a critical mass in the organisation then  IT departments may want to step in an take control of it.  Google have made provision whereby a Chief Information Officer can sign in and demonstrate that the or she owns the organisation's domain name. They willl then receive administrative rights over their organisation's Google Sites.   They also have the option of  upgrading to Google Apps Premier Edition, and at that point becoming a paying Google customer.

The risk of this model is that it poses a question mark over control of the sites. Could I see my team's collaborative site deleted by our Chief Information Officer who had subsequently secured administration rights?  Conversly, from a Chief information Officer's point of view,what would be the point of paying to upgrade to Premier Edition if I didn't get the ability to weed out reundant sites?

I created a TFPL Google Sites application this afternoon, simply by registering with my tfpl.com e-mail address.  If or when any of my TFPL colleagues creates an account for themselves using their work e-mail address they will be:

• told that there is already a TFPL.com instance of Google Sites
• able to see my name and e-mail adress and the names of any other TFPL colleagues who have already created an account for themeselves
• able set up collaborative sites within TFPL.com (the sites themselves are similar to wikis)
• able to assign access permissions to any site they set up within TFPL.com. They can choose between allowing all TFPL colleagues to see it, restricting access to invited colleagues ( they can  also invite people outside the organisation) or allowing the whole world to see it.

In theory if my other forty colleagues signed up we could be up and running with collaborative sites for our projects and programmes within a couple of hours.

See also  Sarah Perez's article on ReadWriteWeb   Is Google Sites the next SharePoint

The future of RM

Earlier this week, we hosted another free training course for our registered temporary workers.  The course, ‘From EDRM to Google Docs: what does the future hold for records management?' was led by James Lappin.

Around 30 of our temps heard James compare three different models for managing electronic documents  (EDRMs, Microsoft SharePoint and Google Docs).  The advantages and disadvantages of each were examined.

‘I thought James Lappin's presentation was excellent. I was particularly impressed with how the presentation was structured and the content thought out.’

‘James is clearly an excellent trainer and able to relate his knowledge of systems in a relaxed manner which makes the information easy to absorb.’

For more information about temps training events or temporary recruitment at TFPL contact katy.crosse@tfpl.com

What you do once you have successfully implemented EDRM?

On Wednesday I heard an extremely witty and informative talk by Ben Plouviez of the Scottish Government.  Ben is one of a select group of people who can say they have successfully implemented an EDRM system all the way across a large and important organisation.

Rolling out EDRM is a long old slog. You have to procure it; configure it; build your fileplan, your retention schedules and access rules; write your policies and procedures; pilot it; take it to every team, get their folders set up and get them trained.  By the time you've done all that you are three years older than when you started.

And what happens next?    Here is my summary of  Ben's advice on what to expect (or rather what not to expect)

• Don't expect a post -implementation party:  most of your project team will have found other roles in the weeks immediately before the end of the implementation project

• Don't expect much in the way of resources to manage and support the system:  Once you've implemented the system the organisation's attention, energy and resources will be diverted elsewhere.

• Don't expect to be able to find people with the multiple skill sets you need to support the system: your ideal support team understands the business and its operational needs; the technology and the configuration of the system; the organisation's records management policies, fileplan, access rules and retention rules; and the legal framework (particularly Data Protection and FOI).  There aren't human beings alive who combine all of these skill sets.

• Don't expect to know what is really going on in terms of usage of the system:  there are very few benchmarks out there for what constitutes good usage of an EDRM system.   Your system might be able to tell you that a certain team has saved a certain number of e-mails to the EDRM.  But what does that tell you? Should they be saving more than that? or less than that? Are they the right e-mails?  When you do come up with a good key performance indicator don't automatically assume that your system will be able to run you a report on it. 

• Don't expect the system to help with information overload: as the system grows and grows with more and more departments contributing to it and more and more documents on it, so the search results return more and more hits and the quantity of information overwhelms the quality of information.

• Expect technology to always move one step ahead of your EDRM:  How does the EDRM capture things like blogs, wikis and instant messages when these things were barely thought of when your implementation started?

• Don't expect your fileplan to survive organisational change unscathed: however hard you try to ignore the organisational structure when you draw up your fileplan, it will inevitably colour the fileplan and when the organisation changes the fileplan will need to be adapted to.

• Don't expect the work on the EDRM to ever finish!

Ben was speaking at Unicom's conference  'Preserving and protecting data and information assets'