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McGuinty Liberals Broke Ontario’s Archives and Recordkeeping Act

In the just released report – Deleting Accountability: Record Management Practices of Political Staff – A Special Investigation Report – Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner (Ann Cavoukian) says high-ranking staff in Dalton McGuinty’s liberal government illegally deleted documents tied to the $585M gas plant scandal. The Commissioner’s investigation was prompted by NDP complaints that key liberal political

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June 6, 2013 No Comments

Observations from The Canadian Institute’s Forum on Records Retention & Electronic Information Management

It was my privilege to co-chair this forum on Records Retention & Electronic Information Management from May 28-29, 2013 with Susan Nickle of Wortzman Nickle Professional Corporation. The Canadian Institute assembled an excellent group of industry experts to explore records retention and diverse electronic information management topics such as cloud computing, outsourcing data storage and processing,

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June 3, 2013 No Comments

It’s Time to Update PIPEDA’s Privacy Protection Provisions

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) received Royal Assent on April 13, 2000 and came into force in stages between January 1, 2001 and January 1, 2004.  When drafting Part 1 of the act – Protection of Personal Information in the Private Sector – lawmakers didn’t have to contend with the widespread use of content

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May 26, 2013 No Comments

Managing GPS Data as a Record

Many organizations such as municipalities, utilities, construction firms, mining and resource companies, waste management contractors, and transportation and logistics companies have fleets of vehicles and large mobile workforces.  If you are an IM manager in one of these organizations, do you manage global positioning system (GPS) data as records? Recently the CBC reported that 31 public

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April 5, 2013 No Comments

Which Desk Are You? Clean or Cluttered?

In a recent survey reported by the Toronto Star, 83% of Canadians agreed that a disorganized or messy workspace negatively affects productivity.  A linked study in Britain came up with similar findings.  These surveys echo a 2012 US survey in Forbes which reported that 57% of workers judge their co-workers by how clean or messy their desks are.  It’s interesting that

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March 31, 2013 No Comments

Two Solitudes: The Next Step in BYOD

Some people say that the current BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend got its start in 2009 when it was widely reported that newly elected US President Barrack Obama refused to give up his Blackberry in favour of the phone supplied by the secret service. He wound up keeping both phones, but I wonder if

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March 26, 2013 No Comments

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

Is Big Data Really the Latest Thing?

If you’re like me, you’re constantly reading articles that depict big data as the ‘next big thing’.  Those articles also usually portray big data as something new.  But is it really new? “No” says Bernhard Warner in a recent BloombergBusinessweek post.  He claims a CIA Analyst named Orrin Clotworthy described “with eerie clarity the promise of data analytics and computer modeling to predict the future” in

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March 21, 2013 No Comments

Carbon Dated: The Last Carbon Paper Company in Canada

The Toronto Star recently profiled Form-Mate, the last carbon paper manufacturer in Canada. Like most people, I haven’t used carbon paper for many years.  In fact, many younger people have probably never encountered this relic from our typewriter generation at all, or experienced the original, pre-email version of  “cc:” (“carbon copy”).  Before we had the “print

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March 18, 2013 No Comments

DNA Storage to Replace Long-term Electronic Storage?

Faced with increasing data storage costs and a data volume that was growing faster than the capacity of the hard drives used to hold it, Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney (two researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute in England) needed to find a way to store the massive volume of genomic data being generated by their

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February 27, 2013 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.