The problems with ERM

Working on a folder structure for an EDRM solution for the pensions department, two things become pretty obvious:

1. We are sorely lacking in understanding of what half the terms used by the department mean. A couple of of times I checked out Wikipedia to figure out what something meant.

2. The way the department want their folders structured does not easily work with the requirements of an EDRM - or at least the one we're using.

Here are some of the causes of these issues, as I see it:

1. Our expertise in various areas' records has been diluted as we've moved away from the local registry system of records management to a more diffuse structure. Admittedly we've never really done anything with pensions, so we'd have had trouble with them anyway, but with not having a local records manager who is also familiar with the work of the specific department, we're not going to necessarily have the expertise to be able to understand the records. Ideally we need to be able to work at length with the people from the department in question, but that's often impractical (particularly when we're based in London and Pensions are in Cardiff).

2. We didn't engage early enough with electronic file creation. We've been using computers to generate documents since I started working at the BBC 18 years ago (admittedly we only had two in an office of 10 when I started, but that changed in less than a couple of years), but we've only been managing any of those records in their native formats since 2002 - so it took us 12 years to try to address the problem.

3. As the record creators have been left alone to structure their own data as they see fit with very little guidance from us, they've got into the habit of doing that in a certain way - which does not necessarily fit the functional classification model that we've been trying to use.

4. We're still trying to follow a one-size fits all approach to records management - where what we probably need are a host of different solutions. We are well aware that there's a difference between paper and electronic records and how they're managed, but the place in our policies and strategies where we acknowledge that might not be at a high enough level. I think we may also run into trouble as we try and merge all the BBC's different media types into one policy framework if we're not careful.

Steve Bailey's keynote speech at the RMS conference this month covered off on some of the issues surrounding these problems - and throughout the conference he was generally looking for solutions that weren't just an electronic version of the hard-copy file systems. I think that's what we need to be doing as well.