A couple of additional reflections. It's gotten a little quiet in the listserv dialog. I hope my "stark realties" message did not squash the discussion of the paperless office issue, because addressing this issue is extremely important now and in the future.

Many people see the difficulties of achieving a paperless office as disheartening. I only see it as further proof of the need for real Records Management and enterprise-perspective Records Managers. Records Managers, Archivists, and Librarians are the only professionals addressing information based primarily on content value.  All of these three professions are critical to the future of high quality professionally managed information, because the IT folks could not care less about managing all media based on content determined value. They only want to deal with the easy stuff - digital information subject to easily executed IT system queries.

For that reason, IT personnel are poorly positioned intellectually or professionally to be comprehensive managers of information. This is because IT professionals limit their focus to digital information, while legal counsels, compliance officers, and C-level executives with brains in their heads realize eventually that information management is much broader than just the "computer stuff." When audits and litigation begin, these executives pay attention to those individuals with the best overall attitude on information management. They figure out who is an ally in keeping them and the organization out of hot water, instead of primarily just running the IT systems.

Records Managers should be proud of the fact that they have a global scope for information management activities in organizations, instead of snobbishly limiting themselves to just digital documents and data. It shows they have a more realistic, more comprehensive, and more responsible perspective for globally managing all information assets.

John

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John Phillips
Information Technology Decisions
www.infotechdecisions.net

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