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I said before that I would continue the blog post on “Why All RIM Professional Should Obtain the CIP,” and this is that continuation. 

Information creation and delivery is constantly changing and this creates new challenges for managing it.  In the past records manager had to be concerned with official records in a file room, but that is quickly changing as information that can hold an organization liable in court can include content on an individual’s computer.  Managing information is no longer about storing and retrieving information from a centralized location because information is both centralized on the server/data center and decentralized to mobile devices and where people are working remotely.

A records manager can no longer just be a records manager, but they also need to be a content manager.  Knowledge of running a mailroom will no longer suffice, but also principles of managing e-mail needs to be in the toolkit of all RIM staff.  Digitization and capture should not be an afterthought or nice to have, but a step that is taken when information comes into the organization at the mailroom. Information management should include in its scope more than just records management, but also metadata management, data management, knowledge management and many other areas because they all intersect.

RIM professional’s needs to have a view of information that is bigger than records.  On the continuum of the value of information and the probability of it becoming a liability their is a need to view all information as having value to the enterprise and not just making that judgment based on if it is a record or not.  A prime example of this is the role that big data plays in information governance.  Do not think that big data is just an issue for data governance and the IT staff.  Here is a great quote from Barclay T. Blair on this from the AIIM webinar,“Governance and Archiving in a Big Data World: How to Protect it, Control it, and Clean it up!”

The future of information governance is not found in that sacred codex, document or record, but rather in the insights that can be gained from the patterns found in the aggregation of these documents and that is the promise of big data…Records management and information management is not about creating this perfect record. It is really about letting us predict the future and that is the promise of big data. That is the promise of being able to get our data, our unstructured content into intranet scale infrastructure so we can point smart analytical tools at it and interrogate that data and ask questions that will drive value. And do that of course in a way that will take into account the legal requirements that we have and the risks associated with it. It is not the individual documents that are important, but the patterns that come with it.

Records and information cannot be managed in the same way it always has been.  This is why the Certified Information Professional (CIP) designation is so crucial.  The information landscape is more than just records and the CIP gives a panoramic view of all that is out there.  There is no area that information is not delivered, used, preserved and made it accessible on that the CIP does not cover. 

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent my employer or client.