Education Business

In non-public sector organisations, especially in the US, the head of IT is increasingly being referred to as the CIO or chief information officer. This sets a responsibility that is much broader then CTO – chief technical officer – requiring IT managers to be involved in the view that digital document files, web pages, reports and e-mails are part of the organisation’s knowledge base and are increasingly the legal record of the organisation’s history. Removing the IT manager function from the school or college management team leaves a vacuum of responsibility for putting together a coherent information and records management policy.
    
A further effect of outsourcing is the standardisation around a popular set of core applications, although to an extent this has already happened with systems such as SIMS (Schools Information Management System). Document and records management modules are available within these applications.
    
The information management discussion, however, is moving beyond the ‘lock-up and preserve’ policy towards a controlled collaboration environment where information is shared with stakeholders – colleagues, parents, governors, regulators and partner establishments. Such collaborative sharing requires a variable level of access and control, and generally a central form of rights management or single sign-on environment. Increasingly, organisations are seeking to provide this shared access both within and beyond the local IT environment, across intranets, extranets and the Internet.

Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0
Largely as a result of the non-availability of a collaboration facility within the local IT infrastructure, many collaborative projects are now being set up using the new social-networking or Web 2.0 tools. These are already familiar to the current generation of students from public sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia. The term Enterprise 2.0 has been coined to cover the use of such tools within a business or organisation for non-social purposes. A major challenge over the next few years for information managers and particularly for records managers will be how to keep these sites within the establishment IT environment in order to capture the knowledge base and record its publication.
    
Interestingly, the first steps in the 2.0 direction frequently involve blogs, and these can be officially sanctioned by - or even written by - the head of the organisation, or they may be unofficial, with other members of staff or other departments opting to bypass existing communication channels by going straight to the web.
    
Implications
The implications of publishing via these publicly available and easily searchable mechanisms have already been exposed in a number of ‘disgruntled employee’ scenarios, and indeed at the individual level where young people in particular have fallen foul of privacy and identity exposure via Facebook. Outright bans on workplace blogging and social networking are likely to drive these activities underground, but even the simple question of whether to allow anonymous postings on official networking or collaboration sites can raise a very lively debate.

Collaboration and SharePoint
Another inevitable issue with outsourced IT will be the status and use of SharePoint, which is rapidly becoming a standard part of the Microsoft installed infrastructure. However, in no way is it an out-of-the-box document, e-mail and records management system.
    
As a collaboration tool, SharePoint uses a document-centric approach to project management, inviting participants to share and edit documents associated with a mini-website for each project – ideal for student communities, teacher resource sharing and academic publishing. Round-robin e-mail attachments can be nailed down to single copies to which version control can be applied, ensuring that everyone is working from the current revision. In a wider sense, collaboration spaces become publishing portals, displacing intranets and Internet sites with a more dynamic content library, yet without reducing security and sign-off control.
    
The question being asked in many schools and colleges is: “Should we entrust our other administrative documentation to SharePoint?” It’s easy to see how SharePoint might help with Health and Safety documentation or school procedure libraries, but can a system that is available to all students and staff be entrusted with sensitive correspondence – for example special needs discussions or staff appraisement reports? How would we link the structured data in systems such as SIMS to the document store in SharePoint, and does that become more difficult if we are accessing SIMS as a remotely hosted system? Dare we lock away both electronic and scanned documents into the SQL Server database, or do we need to maintain paper copies for fixed retention periods?

E-mail Management
Perhaps the most pressing area for action involves recording and archiving of important e-mails. In many ways, this highlights the difference between a technical view and an information management view. Most IT people, and certainly all outsourcers that I have come across, would consider their first priority to be to ensure that all e-mails are captured onto the back-up tapes – and indeed, this is not a trivial task given the use of Blackberries, laptops, and the tendency for Outlook, makes its own choice of where the ‘archive’ will live. However, back-ups are not true archives. They do nothing to provide a controlled but group-accessible search of transactions that may have been agreed or expressed via e-mail last year, or five or ten years ago.
    
The inevitable policy debates with IT about deleting e-mails to save server space should actually be a debate about how to classify those that are important and how to archive them into a separate records management system, dealing appropriately with e-mail threads and multiple copies of the same attachments, and having the concept of a retention period, beyond which the e-mail should be deleted in order to maintain compliance (and to limit potential legal discovery). Many systems are now able to make an intelligent prompt as to where an e-mail should be filed based on automatic metadata extraction of details such as names or course titles.

Education, Education, Education
One thing that is certain from all of this is that educational establishments must take a leaf from their own book and train either their IT staff, their administrative staff, or both, to understand what types of electronic content they are dealing with, how to set policies and objectives for managing it, and what the implications are as we move from paper archives to electronic archives for our compliance records.
    
AIIM has taken steps to improve this situation by introducing a range of training courses and qualifications in ECM (Enterprise Content Management) and Electronic Records Management which can be taken as online self-learning modules or as traditional classroom classes. Details are available at www.aiim.org.uk/training.

AIIM is the international association for Enterprise Content Management. It represents the Information Management community and supports the interests of users and suppliers of technologies and solutions used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver information.
    
AIIM organises a number of events and educational programmes, including the AIIM Certificate Training Programmes, which can be taken as on-line, in-house or classroom courses. The annual AIIM Roadshow provides keynotes, seminars, roundtables and an exhibition of all things ECM. In 2009, the show will visit Edinburgh, Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol and London from June 1st to June 5th. AIIM Professional Members participate as a community of ECM practitioners. See www.aiim.org.uk for details.