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Fighting the Ocean — Record Proliferation and You

In 2011, Futurist Thomas Frey predicted the emergence of new career trends which will be increasingly important over the coming decades.  One of these he called a “Waste Data Manager”, which he describes as follows: “To insure data integrity in today’s fast evolving information storage industry, multiple redundancies have been built into the system. Achieving more streamline (sic) data storage in the future will require de-duplication specialists who can ,,,

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March 25, 2013 No Comments

Internal Social Collaboration: More Records to Manage

I’ve been reading a lot recently about social media and collaboration tools and came across an interesting article in a Harvard Business Review blog (HBR Blog Network) about social collaboration within organizations. Brad Power, a consultant and researcher on process innovation, recently published an article entitled “How Collaboration Tools Can Improve Knowledge Work” which discusses the benefits of internal,

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February 5, 2013 No Comments

‘Unknown’: A New Category of Records

I attended second thought-provoking presentation at last week’s Infonex seminar, Managing E-records in Canada’s Public Sector, in Ottawa. In his presentation, “Defining and Implementing a Practical, Real-Life Information Governance Plan (IGP) for your Organization“, Bruce Miller (President, RIMtech) covered numerous topics such as policies, roles and responsibilities, change management, and performance measurement for electronic document and records management systems (EDRMS)

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January 28, 2013 No Comments

Black, White and Shades of Gray: IM vs. IT vs. Legal

While presenting in Ottawa last week at the Infonex seminar, Managing E-records in Canada’s Public Sector, I attended a presentation by Lewis Eisen.  A former practising lawyer and a former IT systems manager, Lewis is currently the Manager of Records Management Services at Industry Canada. Entitled “Improving Collaboration Among IM, IT, and Legal Professionals“, Lewis explored  the challenges that

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January 28, 2013 No Comments

Privacy rights in the workplace

If you’re like me, you’ve read many e-mail and other records management policies stating that an employee should not expect any privacy when using a workplace computer (i.e. a computer owned by his/her employer). Many organizations are likely revising their policies to prohibit the personal use of workplace computers as a result of a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision

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December 21, 2012 No Comments

Good RIM practices: A key ingredient for e-discovery

Records and information management (RIM) professionals know the many benefits of good RIM practices.  They also know that benefits such as fast, efficient information retrieval and the on-time and secure disposition of valueless records are particularly important for organizations preparing for civil litigation. The importance of good RIM practices to successful electronic discovery (e-discovery) in civil litigation is reinforced

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December 13, 2012 No Comments

PDF/A-3 Standard published

Since the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published the first portable document format/archive (PDF/A) standard in 2005, PDF/A has been heralded by recorded information management professionals and archivists as a mechanism for the secure, long-term preservation of electronic documents.  PDF/A, a subset of the ubiquitous PDF format, doesn’t depend on external programs or information to be displayed.  All information in

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December 4, 2012 No Comments

Tips for mastering your InBox

Some e-mail messages are critically important, others much less so.  All of us struggle – every day – to tame a never-ending flow of messages.  How can we better manage the flow? Over the years, I’ve read several articles about how to master (tame) your InBox.  A recent article that really caught my attention is The 9 Simple

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December 4, 2012 No Comments

“Received. Thanks, Mike” – 3 simple words with big consequences

Most Canadian records and information management (RIM) professionals have heard about the Zubulake v. UBS Warburg litigation presided over by Judge Shira Scheindlin in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.  But what you may not know is how a simple e-mail that would typically be considered a transitory record (or perhaps a non-record) provided a key piece of evidence for establishing the timeline critical to Ms. Zubulake’s victory.

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December 4, 2012 No Comments

Offshore Cloud Storage: Do you know where your data lives?

There’s an insightful article in today’s National Post about the legal implications of offshore cloud storage.  This article should be mandatory reading for any organization thinking about implementing cloud storage.  It also provides a remedial lesson for any Canadian-based organization that embraced cloud storage without first determining where its data would be stored and assessing the risks inherent

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November 21, 2012 No Comments

  • About the Author

  • Sheila Portrait
    Sheila Taylor

  • Sheila Taylor is a well known consultant, educator, speaker and writer with more than 25 years of experience in the information management (IM) field.

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    Case in Point

    That's A Lot of Records!
    Often the requirement for a needs assessment is driven by a specific initiative being considered or an immediate problem to be solved, rather than a general desire to establish a corporate (or organization-wide) IM program. We had a client wanting to improve its management of a specific group of critical records – thousands of member files in paper, microform and digital formats containing hundreds of unique document types.
    Assess, Plan and Schedule
    Ergo reviewed the organization’s current practices for managing those records, compared those practices to best practices, and identified risks and areas for improvement. From there we developed a strategic plan with a focus on records storage and retention. The plan identified the operational, financial and technological requirements for implementing the recommended changes, improvements and enhancements in the lifecycle management of the member records. Activities in the plan were classified as short term (next 6-12 months), medium term (next 12-24 months) and longer term (next 25+ months).
    Step by Step Success
    Implementation of the strategic plan enabled this organization to ensure its member records are properly identified, organized, accessible, protected and retained as long as necessary to meet operational and other requirements.