Leading-edge filing of electronic legal records

This article in the Austin American Statesman newspaper calls Travis County, where I work, one of "the leaders in the state and the nation in taking paper out of the process of filing a case in court."

Meanwhile, in Singapore ...

Here's an item out of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, where the Singapore National Library Board announced it would be launching a new metadata-based search engine within the next six months.

Read all about it here.

So, which is it? Impossible, or inevitable?

More than 12 million employees telework more than 8 hours per week, according to Gartner, which produced the chart reproduced below. MSNBC reports that the trend will accelerate. But plenty of other coverage suggests that top management resistance to telecommuting will continue to block broader adoption.

A must-read article in GTC

According to one recent study, the number one reason for wasting time at work is the Internet.

While I did not participate in this survey, I'm not surprised by the results.

More on BPM

Just click on it:
http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/993-Just-what-do-we-mean-by-BPM?

Is this problem intractable?

The New York Times and Psychology Today report on teleworking: Although 75 percent of managers say that telecommuters are just as productive as their in-office colleagues, only 39 percent say that virtual workers are likely to advance as fast as those employees who go into the office every day. Bosses like to look at their employees and see that they look as if they are working. And being physically present in the office means that employees benefit from those chance moments when the invitation to go for a beer after work, or something like that, is extended by the boss.

One "solution" offered in the Psychology Today article would be video surveillance of the teleworker at home or at other remote job sites, so the boss gets that feeling that they can observe their employee. This wrong approach is based on the usual problem of some managers' illusion that the person they can see is more productive than the one they can't.

The right approach is to train managers to decouple their emotional need to have someone within reach to supervise from tangible, measurable outcomes that teleworkers are expected to deliver, regardless of location.

Organizations that train managers to get over their need to see their employees in person will get the benefits of teleworking, like lower facilities costs, energy conservation, and improved employee motivation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/18/business/media/18offline.html?ref=business

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070723-000016.html

Another AIIM training offering

This one's focused on Business Process Management.

AIIM Survey on BPM

AIIM sent me a survey questionnaire a couple of months ago on Business Process Management. They got about eight hundred responses and half of them were from representatives of organizations of more than 1,000 (like Travis County, where I am one of just over four thousand employees).

When asked, What is the most important obstacle or problem for your organization during a BPM implementation? the most common answer was "Underestimating process and organizational issues."

Does that mean that BPM's focus should be on ways of working, more than technical issues? Perhaps the answer can be found in this article from the AIIM magazine.

And here is a link to the BPM page on my website.

Brush with greatness

Dig on Larry Olson, my father's wife's long-time friend, by clicking on this link:

Government Technology magazine article

If you read the story, it's about Barbara's old friend Larry, who is quite an impressive person. The four of us had lunch at Cafe Josie on 6th in Austin not too long ago and his forceful aura was a reliable indicator of his gravitas. Read the linked story from Government Technology Conference, and you'll see what I mean.

The final paragraph of the GTC article bears repeating (presumably a fair use of copyrighted material):

"We are pleased to have executive practitioners of Mike's and Larry's knowledge and experience join TPI," said Ed Glotzbach, president and CEO of TPI, in a company release. "These industry-recognized leaders will provide our public-sector clients leading-edge vision and practical guidance on overcoming challenges within their operating environments and making realistic changes in transforming their organizations. It's a growing need for which we are positioned to provide innovative advice."

Following up with Mr. Hedge

As noted in this blog in an earlier post, the term "BPM" shows up in the sales brochures of countless vendors and consultants. Companies selling IT products or management consulting services see that BPM has been building momentum in the private sector for a few years now, and so are defining BPM to mean whatever they think will help them sell something.

BPM is sometimes described as a business discipline or function that uses business practices, techniques and methods to create and improve business processes. Under this general definition, just about any process improvement discipline or activity, including ISO 9000, Total Quality Management, or Six Sigma methods might fit. But at least one expert opines that BPM has to narrow its definition to an IT-related focus if the term "BPM" is to have meaning.

Arthur J. Hedge III spoke to an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers meeting in New Jersey recently. He runs a consulting firm focused on technology and BPM-related IT products and services. His talk was billed as having an open source angle, and he applies a definition of open source that varies from some traditionalists' understanding of that term.

Some remember an open source definition originating in the "Free Culture" movement, philosophically opposed to profit and dedicated to the cause of sharing intellectual property for the betterment of all mankind through technology. Those traditionalists note that what Mr. Hedge and IT vendors label open source has a different meaning; this BPM definition of open source describes products similar to the freeware versions of popular programs whose vendors entice users with a small, stripped-down version of a program that is available for sale as a bigger version with more power and functionality. Damn that was a long sentence! You had better go back and read it again.

Some of the vendors applying the Hedge definitions of BPM and open source include Intalio, JBoss and Active Endpoints.

And one last note: When I spoke to him on the phone, Mr. Hedge pointed out that when specialists in ISO 9000, TQM and Six Sigma describe and define their own disciplines, they never use the term BPM to describe what they're doing. He has a point.

Photographs as electronic records

There’s an article in Popular Photography and Imaging about an online image management system designed for the professional photography industry. It’s not a new product, but an upgrade of an existing system used by photographers, art directors, photo editors, and others who need shared access to images. As you would expect, there’s a workflow component also.

Of special interest to electronic records managers who work with photographs is the fact that this photo-oriented DMS supports Dublin Core metadata standards.

Spam King dethroned

This week's arrest of Robert Alan Soloway, the "Spam King," is not expected to reduce the flood of crap clogging our inboxes, according to Ireland's ElectricNews.net.

Soloway may be the most prominent US-based spammer, and his arrest has to be considered good news. But as Spamhaus notes, Soloway had been surpassed by even more evil and cunning spammers in Asia, where they operate with impunity.

Groping for a BPM Definition

This term "BPM" shows up in the sales brochures of countless vendors and consultants, as well as a recent survey conducted by AIIM (survey findings not released as of today). Companies selling IT products or management consulting services see that BPM jargon du jour has been building momentum in the private sector for a few years now, and so are defining BPM to mean whatever they think will help them sell something.

BPM is sometimes described as a business discipline or function that uses business practices, techniques and methods to create and improve business processes. Under this general definition, just about any process improvement discipline or activity, including ISO 9000, Total Quality Management, or Six Sigma methods might fit. BPM is also used to describe IT products that work with business quality approaches.

Tonight, Thursday, May 31, 2007, Arthur J. Hedge III is scheduled to speak to an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers function in New Jersey. Mr. Hedge is a member of the AIIM Document Management standards committee and spoke on BPM topics at this year's annual AIIM event in April.

His talk tonight is described as a description of the various software elements that together make up a BPM solution and open source versions of those software elements.

There are over 100 vendors that develop products in the BPM software market. Sometimes, these products are marketed as tools that allow organizations to design, automate, and manage the activities of knowledge workers from within one platform.

Mr. Hedge III will be throwin' it down old skool at the Morris County Library in Whippany, New Jersey tonight, just minutes away from Molly Malone's Irish-American Restaurant.

Open Source and Business Process Management

Tomorrow night (Thursday, May 31, 2007), Arthur J. Hedge III is scheduled to speak to an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers function in New Jersey. Mr. Hedge is a member of the AIIM Document Management standards committee and spoke on BPM topics at this year's annual AIIM event in April.

His talk this week is described as a description of the various software elements that together make up a BPM solution and open source versions of those software elements.

Mr. Hedge III wrote this article a couple of years ago, which makes it relevant now, given the state of maturity in the BPM trend. He wrote, "Definitions vary as to what this software category encompasses ..." and that is still the case.

More recently, he published this article focused on "walking you through" the development of a business process diagram.

"Teleworker" in my inbox today

I always look forward to Teleworker, and read it right away.

Today's lead story says that a survey of more than 200 government managers from 45 defense and civilian agencies reveals that management resistance is a strong barrier to telework and highlights a perception that there is limited top-down support for telework.

Conference in Boston

ONStor Inc. CEO Bob Miller is scheduled to make a presentation today at the annual JPMorgan Technology Conference in Boston.

ONStor claims its Network Attached Storage products reduce the cost of storage management by consolidating information from multiple Windows, UNIX and Linux devices into a single scalable file storage environment.

This article, published last year in Infoworld, notes that 5 exabytes (that’s 5 million terabytes) of new data were created and stored in 2002. Another study cited in that article predicts that the overall volume of data archived by government and corporations will grow to 27 exabytes by the year 2010. Some of those data will be stored in databases, but much of the new information will be unstructured data created in a variety of formats, including images, sound snippets, data series, and office documents. If Miller's products can reduce the cost of managing these electronic records, that's a story he should tell today. ONStor's Pantera Clustered NAS was selling for about half the cost of similar products from major vendors in this category when it went on sale last year.

Privacy vs. technology

Privacy is a necessary condition of individual autonomy and dignity, but the federal government's security establishment is rapidly increasing its ability to monitor you by hiring or compelling private-sector corporations to provide billions of electronic records.

Here's a link to an article published by the Government Technology Conference that should be of interest to electronic records management specialists.

Dr. Galloway's presentation today at ARMA Austin

She gave a briskly paced talk about DSpace. None of the ARMA members had any questions.

In the article she wrote linked in my post from this morning, Dr. Galloway wrote: "There are potentially many advantages to be gained by the implementation of TERM (Texas Email Repository Model)."

But I didn't get a chance to ask her what kind of follow-up had been done after her TERM design had been delivered to the State of Texas. She was trying to eat and I didn't think it would be polite to interrupt her to ask. There was a diagram from the TERM document included in her PowerPoint presentation today, but it was only referenced in passing.

RM celebrity spotted at today's meeting: David Gracy, recipient of the 2005 Katherine Drake Hart History Preservation Award for his contribution to the preservation of Austin and Travis County history.

Monthly Austin ARMA meeting

University of Texas Professor Patricia Kay Galloway is scheduled to speak at today's (May 15) monthly Austin ARMA meeting. Prof. Galloway was the Project Leader, Electronic Records Project, a research grant to develop long-term preservation of state government electronic records. She was also the Principal Investigator, Texas State Library and Archives Commission Agency Webpage Metatagging project to improve state agency metatagging by reviewing pages and developing additional educational materials and reviewing tools.

Prof. Galloway is an expert in digital archiving and the author of this article about access to and long-term preservation of digital records in state government settings, particularly email records.

Buying Mac?

Posted from the Apple Store in the Domain. Last night's Cap Mac meeting was worthwhile if only to find out that one of these Apple Stores was located close to my house.

ERM, railroads, and metaphors

On this date in 1869, in Promontory, Utah, the Union Pacific railroad tracks joined those of the Central Pacific Railroad. The two sections of track had been started at either end and met in the middle.

The ERM metaphor that occurs to us today, then, has the traditional archivists and records managers building their track in one direction, and the IT experts building the other way, with each side meeting in the middle and effectively linking their disciplines under the aegis of electronic records management!

To salute this historic anniversary (the train thing I mean), I will attend tonight's meeting of the Capital Area Mac Users group in Austin, Texas. Tonight's topics include Adobe Creative Suite 3. I have a dated Mac at home and plan to update it as soon as I can learn enough about them to select the right one to buy.

I'm confident that Adobe Creative Suite 3 uses the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) markup language. XMP defines a metadata model that can be used with any defined set of metadata items.

This post most of all!

A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. To carry out a strategy, ERM specialists may use tactics, logical analysis, or brute force - - whatever specific elements can help realize the benefits of successful execution of the plan.

Analytics is broadly defined as the science of logical analysis, or the branch of logic dealing with analysis. Thanks to a product called Google Analytics, bloggers often think specifically of that particular product when they read the word "analytics," but like the word "strategy," analytics is a word that many different users understand in various ways.

What, then, does the blog you are reading now have to do with logical analysis applied in the service of a long-term plan of action? The answer is hinted at in this phrase:

i will BLOG it until i BECOME it

Blogging about blogging

Technorati says there are 71 million blogs, while Gartner claims there are now already 200 million ex-bloggers. According to Gartner:

Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007.

I came across this while reading this AIIM blog.

Breaking news! which everybody knew last week

Dell is supposed to announce today that it will team up with Novell and Microsoft to distribute Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server software (SLES) along with Microsoft's Windows Server software. I am typing this post on a Dell PC, networked using Novell software, which of course connects to Microsoft's products.

The IT planners at Travis County (where I work) seem to think that Novell is going to go out of business within a few years.

I've been told that Microsoft claims that Linux infringes upon Microsoft intellectual property; Novell says the deal being announced today is not an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property.

Click here to read the article in today's Boston Globe.

Happy 4 de Mayo

Today's Austin/Travis County governments Cinco de Mayo celebration at Wooldridge Park was a day earlier than the traditional date, since tomorrow is Saturday and no city or county staff would be available to attend. Your correspondent had his blood pressure taken at a booth in the park: 138 over 86, too high, the nurse said, but not officially into the "hypertension" range. I also won a T-shirt in a drawing.

Archiving blog content

This article by Richard Entlich of Cornell University is a few years old now, but still worth reading. The author notes that the enthusiasm with which a new blogger embarks on the adventure usually wanes as the chore of making regular updates begins to burden one's psyche with a staggering load of dread. This seems to have been my starting point. I was kind of hoping that the more I blogged, the easier it would get. Doesn't seem to be working that way so far.

Anyway, the subject of the article will fascinate bloggers who are interested in ERM and records managers who are interested in blogs. The very concept of blogs, these most ephemeral of electronic records, in the context of archiving and long-term preservation blows my mind!

Webmasters note this development

NotePage, Inc. of Hanover, Massachusetts has added RSSFilter to their popular RSS scripts directory.

RSSFilter is a PHP script that filters the contents of an RSS feed. The filters can be defined by the publisher so that the resulting RSS feed contains only the information they want. RSSFilter uses rules to filter the items that are included from a feed in the resulting feed.

PHP is a scripting language that can be embedded into HTML. Read more about it at this link.

In case you need a quick introduction to RSS, this post by the inimitable Jesse Wilkins links to an RSS basics video primer that Jesse liked.

Webmasters interested in electronic records management should note that RSSFilter supports Dublin Core namespace extensions.

How not to manage your electronic records

A couple of articles published today dramatize the dilemma faced by anybody who has both email and money.

In one article, email users just give up on the technology entirely, as if that were some kind of answer.

Meanwhile, in another article, a Microsoft executive says the company spends an average of $20 million per case on e-discovery.

The point is: Deleting an entire inbox worth of electronic records is not a management plan. No lawyer is going to want to offer as a defense that his client never read her email.

Overcoming resistance to telecommuting

During the weekly Commissioners Court meeting today, Travis County (Texas) Commissioner Margaret Gomez alluded to the number one obstacle to telecommuting: Resistance by managers who insist that the only way to be sure employees are working is to keep them on site.

And in Viriginia, Governor Timothy M. Kaine yesterday ordered executive branch agencies to maximize the use of telecommuting. Click here to read more about Governor Kaine’s Executive Order 48.

Telecommuting and the ADA

The Americans with Disabilities Act requires employers like Travis County, Texas to provide reasonable accommodation for qualified applicants and employees with disabilities. Reasonable accommodation is any change in the work environment or in the way things are customarily done that enables an individual with a disability to do a job.

The link below to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission answers some FAQ about using telecommuting to comply with the ADA:

http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/telework.html

Resistance to Telecommuting

Survey results released today suggest that governments could save money if the elected officials embraced telecommuting.

This article in Government Technology says that management resistance is the leading obstacle to telework (telecommuting) adoption. (Let me know when that link expires and I'll edit this post.)

Similar issues face local governments. Elected officials seek savings, like those that would be realized if fewer government employees needed offices, desks, parking spaces etc.

But they fear that the only way to get people to work is to have them physically present on-site so that they can be monitored.

Ironically, this stifles initiative and reduces productivity, as employees concentrate on looking busy instead of actually getting results.

Six minutes of your time would be well-spent if you clicked on the video below:




For more information:
http://www.telework.gov

The Certification

The AIIM ERMs training program is based on identified best practices from AIIM's 60,000 members in North America and Europe. The content is defined and reviewed by Education Advisory Groups that consist of information executives and professionals, representing industries, solution providers, analysts, and consultants. Examples of members are US District Courts, Gartner, and FileNet. The training programs have then been developed in partnership with Cornwell Management Consultants and The Oxford Group. The training I attended was taught by Jesse Wilkins.

Specialized and certified

Having completed their training program and passed the exam, I am certified by AIIM as a specialist in Electronic Records Management.


The AIIM Training Program

AIIM is the Electronic Records Management association which promulgates the standard for procedures for evaluating scanner quality cited in the Texas Administrative Code, Title 13, Chapter 7.