Blogs

An AIIM 2013 sneak peek at what you’ll be seeing at AIIM 2013. Enjoy, and follow #AIIM13 and @AIIMcon for all of the latest news and noise about next year’s event.

I'll be speaking on Thursday, March 21 at 3:00 PM. Join me for: 

From Records Management to Information Management: A game-changing strategy by Land O’Lakes

I had SO MUCH fun this week. I had the honor of “testing” my AIIM conference presentation, “Moving from Records Management to Information Governance” on a group of local records managers.*

I kicked it off with my “there are no records; there is only information” premise and, to my amazement, none of the records managers in the room threw rotten tomatoes at me. Of course, Minnesotans are known for their chronic politeness, so I don’t always take lack of tomatoes as validation.

In the high level introductory part of the presentation, I talked about the economic, social, and technology forces that are driving the need for this change. Some of the input from the audience at this point was invaluable. For example, think about giving your kid their first cell phone. If it was more than, say, 5 years ago, did you have any idea how to teach them about proper use of that device? What about social media? How many organizations lay down clear rules about that before it becomes an issue?

As much as I like the high level stuff, what really interests me is taking a concept, like Information Governance, down a level where we discuss the specifics of getting started. Some of the specifics included how to connect it to the strategic direction of the organization and how to make sure the program actually makes it easier for people to do their jobs (as I am always saying….it starts with “the work”). And then we discussed the importance of an all-encompassing, big bucket retention schedule as one of the critical tools for implementation. I’ll save details on that for another post.

I am not one of those people who rehearse my presentations, so I “fill in the blanks” as I go through the slides. That way, I am as surprised by the content as the rest of the audience. As a result, I ended up using our recent acquisition of Kozy Shack to illustrate several points. In terms of subject matter that is rich with potential analogies and irreverent comments, pudding is a gold mine.

In conversations with some of the attendees afterwards, I recognized that I had a significant advantage at Land O’Lakes because I was on the “ground floor” of the records management initiative here. So, I got to launch the program based on Information Governance principles instead of having to retrain the organization to think differently about Records Management. So, for any organization that has a small or neglected Records Management program, you can actually consider that to be an advantage if you want to move toward Information Governance. It made several of us feel better to realize that.

I’m still not sure I’ll be able to get through all my content in the 30 minutes I have allocated at the AIIM conference, but I can always save the pudding analogies for my blogs, right?

* I have to give credit for a significant percentage of the fun factor being generated by the attendee who brought her 5 month old daughter. Who can be all stuffy and serious with a good natured baby in the room? No one, that’s who.

See you in New Orleans. Don't forget to register for AIIM 2013.