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OK, here's a new buzzword: RIM 2.0. 

The ARMA Northern Virginia chapter coined this term for its 2010 - 2011 chapter program theme.  It is not especially original, but it is designed to incorporate the E2.0 and Web 2.0 mantras into a major evolution for Records and Information Management.

Here's the deal.  Legal discovery rules say everything is discoverable. It matters not one whit if an organization has defined something as a record or not. So drafts, personal emails, flash drives, tweets, IMs, Facebook, LinkedIn, backup tapes, security cameras, audit logs - and on and on, are all "records" that can be used in a court of law.

The RIM profession is still struggling with duplicate paper copies, microfilm, and email, and now it has to deal with social media, cloud computing, all sorts of electronic messages and files that it has no idea how to manage or control.

The new social media and cloud technologies promote sharing and collaboration, while RIM worries about records declaration tools, retention rules and records destruction.  It is a classic tension between openness and collaboration vs. governance and control.

Because digital storage costs have plummeted, there is little pressure to delete or destroy information in the cloud.  From Google's perspective, keep it forever.  As long as you can find what you are looking for when you need it, we're good.

This tendency flies in the face of the traditional RIM philosophy, which is based on the high cost of paper storage, the perceived high cost of digital storage (which is less valid each year), and the liability of keeping things longer than necessary.

Take email - the traditional RIM philosophy says destroy as soon as possible because of potential liability.  Try to categorize if possible and treat email the same as their paper counterparts based on role or subject.   The new trend is to use an email archive and keep it forever.  Now you can satisfy the courts easily without having to load lots of backup tapes, and everyone should know that emails are open season in any legal case.  And because there are PST files everywhere, flash drives, home computers, etc. the ability of any organization to truly delete specific emails is iffy at best.

This is a topic that will impact the RIM profession for years to come, and the prediction here is that major changes are afoot.