Beautifully said, Natasha!  I couldn't agree more.

I have been following this thread with considerable interest, but as I am currently very busy doing my 'day job', actively promoting 'Next Generation Records Management' on the side and preparing for my upcoming ARMA NOVA keynote on 'The Disposition Imperative', I have been unable to comment to the extent I would like. Hopefully, I will have more time to get more deeply engaged toward the end of the month.  

That said, I could not miss out on the opportunity to comment on why I believe this topic is vitally important and it is imperative that we continue to keep the dialog going.  

We are awash in useless information.  In every organization, in every industry across the world.  The 'save everything forever' policies that we've have adopted - purely by default - are demonstrably unsustainable.  The over-retention, over-preservation of ALL forms of information is the information technology challenge of our generation.  It is the root cause, or at very least, a partial cause of every information problem our organizations face today.  

And no one - NO ONE - can solve this problem, but qualified, experienced professional Records Managers.  This is true for one reason: only Records Managers are capable of shouldering the responsibility for the destruction of our massive volumes of useless information.  We are the only ones who are willing to pull the 'disposition trigger.' No one else will do it: not IT staff, not line-of-business workers, not General Counsel. No one.

And things will only get worse.  With cloud computing, mobile applications, and the so-called 'Internet of Things' still in their earliest stages, the explosive growth of information over the last two decades is about to look like a minor spike on the timeline.  

Records Managers are the gatekeepers between our organizations and absolute information chaos.  If we don't focus on doing the same job we've done for thousands of years - effectively managing information, regardless of format, through all five stages of the information lifecycle: creation, distribution, use, maintenance and disposition - then the results will be disastrous for all of us.  It is no more complicated than that.            
 
Don Lueders, CRM, CDIA

-----Records Management Program <[log in to unmask]> wrote: -----
To: [log in to unmask]
From: NKhramtsovsky 
Sent by: Records Management Program 
Date: 03/03/2016 02:07AM
Subject: Re: As AIIM Withers, Will ARMA Be Its White Knight?

Dear Peter,

I am with ARMA for a rather long time. Either during that period I became too knowledgeable for my own good (I sincerely doubt that), or ARMA as a source of information became less relevant. Ten years ago, any issue of IMJ was precious to me, but nowadays I rarely find articles that are worth reading. Ten years ago, ARMA was a leader in standardization in the field – vital word is “was”… Ten years ago, the membership dues were a huge sum for a poor Russian girl, but I gladly paid them because the return on this...

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