Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

Email has become a ubiquitous business tool in the last 20 years. It has become the default tool for purposes too numerous to list: announcements, distributing documents, sales and customer service interactions, among other uses. Email’s versatility means it is used in all areas of an organisation’s business, which means that it may hold information about any aspect of an organisation. It’s also increasingly a part of the daily life of private citizens: in Denmark, the e-Government strategy mandates that all citizens are to have digital post boxes by November 2014.

In our experience, organisations have had ineffective email management strategies which have led to the accumulation of large volumes of email in email archives and servers. While tools have been developed to classify email within archives for accessibility and e-discovery purposes, we have yet to hear of an example of an organisation which has been able to conduct automated, analytical and value-appropriate destruction of email from its email servers or email archives. Read the rest of this entry »

In our next post to celebrate Information Awareness Month, we are again looking at social media.

As information professionals, we need to respond to the fact that a lot of key business operations are moving to social media technologies.  Read the rest of this entry »

For Information Awareness Month here at State Records, we are doing a series of posts on key challenges facing information professionals today.

And, Master Chef style, these challenges don’t get much bigger than digital information retention and disposal.

The ad hoc and unregulated deletion of information and the unwarranted over-retention of information can both critically affect business performance. Therefore, decisions about how long to keep information are strategically fundamentally important. Read the rest of this entry »

To celebrate Information Awareness Month, this week at State Records we are going to explore some of the key challenges facing information professionals today, starting with digital transitions.

So what are digital transitions? Read the rest of this entry »

Information is at the core of government business, and is a core asset. A big deal  is made of this in government ICT strategies (NSW, New Zealand) and it is commonly heard from ICT research firms like Ovum and Gartner,  but what does it actually mean? We emphasise that it if you want value from information, you need sophisticated strategies to manage it rather hoping for some technological breakthrough to solve all your problems and deliver that often-promised but elusive value. Read the rest of this entry »

At State Records NSW we have redeveloped our Recordkeeping in the NSW public sector pages on our main State Records website.

We really hope this redevelopment helps to make our extensive resources about records and information management much more accessible, and accessible to a very broad audience.

So what changes have we made?

To improve its accessibility, we did a lot of consolidation of our online information. This brought together content relating to specific topics that had previously been located in different sections of the website.

We also simplified the basic structure of our site, grouping all our content under three key headings Rules, Advice, and Resources.

We hope you do find our redeveloped site cleaner and simpler to navigate but we would love any feedback on what you do and don’t like about it.

Importantly, however, while redeveloping the website, we also took the opportunity to quite significantly redevelop some of our content about digital information management.

This post introduces our new digital content.

Read the rest of this entry »

High risk business areas in each organisation should be priorities for information management activity, to identify and mitigate any information-related risks these business areas might face.

The following defines common and specific information risks, looks at some strategies for identifying areas of high risk business which face information risk and provides mitigation strategies and case studies for dealing with information risk. As usual, we always appreciate your comments and suggestions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry it has taken a little while to add to this next instalment of our social media FAQs, but we have been receiving new batches of social media questions that we have wanted to answer and then share, hence the delay.

So, this time around:

• How frequently do I need to capture records of our social media engagement?
• Can we tell clients that we don’t want to receive their feedback or complaints via social media?
• Do I need to keep information about what content the hyperlinks in my social media posts led to?
• Does the information that I make and keep about my social media business need to look exactly like it did online?
• Can I use just one tool for managing all my social media information?
• We have a broadcast system to communicate emergency messages via social media when needed – do I need to know the time and date that I broadcast a particular social media message and know when someone receives it?
• What information management considerations apply to wikis?
• What information management considerations apply to collaborative editing tools like Google Docs?

Read the rest of this entry »

At our most recent EDRMS Implementer’s Group meeting, we discussed digital disposal.

Specifically we discussed:

• are organisations using disposal authorities to sentence, retain or destroy digital information?
• are there drivers for or barriers to digital disposal?
• what are some main issues that might be impeding the implementation of digital disposal?

Lots and lots of interesting issues were discussed:

Read the rest of this entry »

At State Records we have been thinking more about issues to consider when moving to the cloud.

In this post we explore:

• why use of cloud-based email is growing in government
• information management issues arising from use of cloud-based email applications, and
• possible risk mitigation strategies that can be put in place to manage these issues.

The aim of this post is to continue the discussion about important information management issues that need to be considered when email is being moved to the cloud, and to help formulate strategies that could support government organisations that are adopting cloud-based email.

Read the rest of this entry »