I recently attended a seminar on International Aspects of Records Management conducted by David O. Stephens and sponsored by ARMA Houston. Although not the primary topic of the seminar (but certainly related) was a conversation concerning archiving for corporate memory in the digital age.

Anne asked earlier this week if we can clarify the value of efficient information management. And: can it be translated into a profitability statement? Jesse provided good statistics on email use and discovery related costs. As he pointed out, there are resources available to help quantify costs. You likely have specific incidents within your own organization that you can point to as lost or down time due to ineffective processes and tools.

I’ll risk supporting yet another acronym and agree that the distinction matters. It helps clarify and define our intentions and scope. It highlights a difference in the same way that RM / RIM does. Are we managing records or are we managing records and information? In this case and to align with the industry – are we managing records or are we managing content and records? If however, we fail to make that distinction work for us or to understand the implications and opportunities, it will be just another acronym.

I am the Director of the ECRM Business Consulting Services practice at Access Sciences. In ECRM Business Consulting, we design information architecture components, such as taxonomies and metadata models, and we create policies, processes, and other governance structures necessary to implement and maintain those components. We build for the enterprise and can implement down to the work group or department.