Funny how the more things change, how often many things stay the same. I've been doing some personal records management and cleaning out my garage and tossing extra issues of old magazines (do I really need 24 copies of the 1999 November/December issue of inform?). On a whim, I flipped through the issue. After overcoming the shock of seeing how much younger both John Mancini and I looked (for the record, I continue to look much younger than John), I skimmed my Letter from the Editor, which was about my visit to the 2009 ARMA Conference.

Title: The Increasing Importance of Records Management

I'll just say that there was a theme among many of the speakers at the conference that rang true. Records management isn't just a tactical issue for companies any longer, but a strategic planning necessity and one that senior managers should be much more aware of and receptive to.

After I read that, I know it's July, but it felt a bit like Ground Hog's Day: when is that message going to sink in and when is the issue of records management going to get its due recognition?

Mark Mandel likewise poses an interesting question on his blog this week, "Is the RIM profession becoming obsolete?" and notes the tension between the need to collaborate on documents and the need to control them (also the subject of a conference presentation I attended that year, "KM depends on collaboration adn the sharing of a wide variety of information . . . . if a company has emails that are useful for its KM initiative but could pose a risk in litigation, What do you do?"

Shouldn't we have gotten a better handle on that by now too?

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