Records management in Australia is a well-established field with a strong focus on compliance and accountability.

In this interview with Conni Christensen from synercon.co we want to discuss the current state and future trends in records management. Conni Christensen founded Synercon in 1998 and is the designer of a.k.a. information governance software. She has more than twenty years’ experience in records management and is actively involved in the RM community, e.g. the Institute for Information Management (IIM) and the Records and Information Management Professionals of Australasia (RIMPA).

Questions: Daniel Burgwinkel

Answers: Conni Christensen

What is the current state of records management in Australia?

Let me give you a bit of history.  I think records management in Australia really established itself 25 years ago.

The establishment of standards, laws and regulations that came out in the 1990s triggered the development of technology specifically for records management. So we have had a structured and regulated approach to records management for almost 30 years. That has probably been our underpinning platform.

Organisations in the public and private sector have to work within the structures and the regulated approach. It is more regulated for government, but at the same time it is regulated for organisations.

The requirements for records management have been built in in many different regulations. It’s built into company law, it’s built into health and safety law. It’s been built into tax law, so private organisations have a lot of regulations that they have to comply with and therefore they would tend to do even though these days.

That sort of situation is today much more fluid with changing technologies. However with new technologies, like Cloud applications and Microsoft 365, managing records in a compliant way has new challenges.

The regulated approach, which is now becoming more flexible, because it’s been seen that when we’ve been too inflexible and we’ve insisted that records are kept in specific record keeping systems, people have broken out of those systems and started to sort of manage or “unmanaged” records outside of those traditional records management systems. SharePoint, OneDrive and network drives are all places where records are stored but not necessarily managed.

How do you see the future of the job profile records manager in Australia?

Records Management is a well-established discipline, but the roles have changed significantly, and the challenge has been to build new skills for a digital transformation.

One of the problems we have had with our records managers in Australia is that they have tended to be quite analogue in their approach and have background in disciplines like archives and history.

We created learning courses to skillup records manager over many years because we need to teach people new skills on e.g. data management, data architecture and business process integration.

One important aspect is knowing “why” and the other aspect is knowing “how”:

• Why do we do things a certain way?
• Why do we do functional classification?
• Why do we do retention and disposal in a particular way?
• Why do we archive in a certain way?

And then knowing how, so you know how to do it digitally as opposed to doing it in an analogue way. So those are the skills that we teach to bridge the gap.

What are the main trends for records management the future?

Trend 1: digital process transformation

The first thing is digital process transformation. It is moving us from analogue to digital. Now by digital we mean machine driven. We are really moving from people doing the work to machines doing the work.

Trend 2: AI

The next trend, of course, is artificial intelligence. We need to use the artificial intelligence tools and we use tools like auto classification and auto appraisal. AI is all about being able let machines process enormous quantities of data of records. But they need to be fed with intelligence.

The artificial intelligence is coming from the knowledge that we put into those tools. And the knowledge of the domain has to be captured in rules. Therefore we have to build taxonomies and ontologies to build rules for e.g. recognising and sorting content and records.

People say it is an AI driven world, but it’s in knowledge driven AI and so our job is to create knowledge products that go into AI. I think one of the trends that will happen is that we will start sharing that knowledge. The trend will be the development of taxonomies and ontologies based on knowledge tools that we feed into AI.

Trend 3: Compliance

We are in the litigation driven world and not just litigation. The need for privacy and security is increasing  and the penalties in Australia are quite high. An example is the case of Medibank  and a Medical Insurance Company that have now being sued by the regulator and it’s possible that the fines could run into up to a trillion dollars. The cost of non-compliance is going to be very, very high. Which makes means that people will want to invest in records management and compliance.

More information on the features of the a.k.a software suite: https://a-k-a.co/

The joined team of a.k.a and krm.swiss awill be happy to give you a demo and discuss with you real world use cases. Please contact info@krm.swiss