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A Tweet is a record

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One of the questions that came out of last week's #ECMjam resonated with me: Are tweets records? I was on the road, occasionally able to watch the conversation on my mobile phone, but unable to jump in and add my thoughts while it was happening live. But I'm voicing my opinion now: Yes, a Tweet is a record.

I think this is an important question, and part of the increasingly business relevant "social productivity solution" discussion within ECM, SharePoint, and digital records management, in general. Yes, Tweets are sometimes records -- to be kept, versioned, discussed, tagged, rated, liked, cross-referenced, and searchable. But few companies are yet capturing them. The goal is to put them in context, relating them to other records, adding to the social fabric of your content.

If I am a business owner, I want to capture all forms of communication happening around my records: paper, email, instant messaging, audio, video. We can pretty much do all of this today in SharePoint and other ECM platforms, but we're not yet doing this with Tweets. Why?

As social patterns shift and social computing features become more integral to our enterprise applications, Tweets, like email and instant messaging, are becoming more relevant. The problem is that few organizations are yet capturing and tracking this form of communication, and are thereby losing these important discussion threads. In the late 90's as consumer-based instant messaging platforms (AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MS Messenger) gained in popularity, several private IM platforms were launched as a way to control the conversation happening within the firewall, and allowing organizations to retain this information. Even now, IM dialog can be captured and saved as a text file on most platforms, even automated.

What is needed is similar set of tools to capture and classify Tweets. Tools that better mirror the shifting patterns of communication. Social productivity solutions that allow you to store it in SharePoint, version it, and track it in relation to other content, your project, or your business initiative.

What do you think? 

Comments

Easier to ban that capture

Submitted by Daniel O'Leary August 05, 2011 - 2:16 PM

Most organizations find it easier to ban or block sites like Yammer or Twitter rather than create policies, train users, and make sure that messages are archived and discoverable.

That being said, tweets and IMs for me at least are very transactional, and rarely become records. Most of the communication I see are things like sharing blog posts or content, and coordinating things like meetings or checking what someone wants on their bagel.

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hard to do, yes, but increasingly important

Submitted by Christian Buckley August 06, 2011 - 1:24 PM

Most tweets, especially through consumer tools (Twitter, free version of Yammer) are very transactional. But you can't say the content is not critical because of the current limitations of the technology. There are important threads that happen across these tools. Our business systems are not yet able to adequately capture, retain, and tag these threads, but the tools are coming.

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Tweet Stream is a record

Submitted by Chris Riley, ECMp, IOAp August 05, 2011 - 7:55 PM

Christian,

As usual good post. I feel it's not just the tweet that is a record, but the stream of tweets. This in many ways works against the fundamentals of records management, which is, it's not just about what you keep, it's about what you get rid of. For effective records management of social media, I think this principle has to change, which is keep everything! This is a battle which right now is impossible to win.

So yes it would be so cool to declare particular tweets records, along with all meta-data including Geo-tagging, client used, what it's in response too, etc.

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it shouldn't be all or nothing

Submitted by Christian Buckley August 06, 2011 - 1:31 PM

I forsee future solutions that allow you to quickly and easily select and deselect the transactional data to be attached/embedded within your records, putting these interactions in context to the records/artifacts being discussed and giving users a complete picture. Think about how you can sort through email based on discussions. Why can't you do the same thing with tweets?

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Except for Disposistion

Submitted by Chris Riley, ECMp, IOAp August 07, 2011 - 12:33 PM

Christan,

This works, except for the disposition part of records management. You can't really create a retention schedule for tweet content, because though you may delete a tweet from your system when retention hits, you can't ensure that it's been deleted on the web. Therefore proper records management of tweets would have to include the concept of permanent retention. If you don't have it, they do. This concept is very hard to swallow for traditional records management.

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agreed

Submitted by Christian Buckley August 08, 2011 - 11:54 PM

I agree that this is a limitation of current tools. You would need a way to select and deselect transactional data, as I mentioned above, as well as move the conversation between public and private, ensuring that a conversation could be retained, archived, and deleted.

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Making the tools into real business tools takes time

Submitted by Randy Moeller August 16, 2011 - 10:41 AM

I'm not sure anyone wants a Petabyte of tweets. A string of tweets becomes important if that is the only process which contains evidence in a risk area. If I use tweets to create a list of terms which are agreed to by another tweet, I will need it. If it is followed up by a document which we both sign, the tweets become extra as the signed document will take precedence in court just like it would take precedence over a verbal agreement. Like conversations, email and company records in any medium, most tweets have little value over the life of human existence otherwise known as permanent.

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don't focus on existing tool limitations

Submitted by Christian Buckley August 16, 2011 - 11:07 AM

Nobody said track *all* tweets, but only those that are relevant to the conversation. But I'd also say that your ECM vision of the importance of this content is also limiting.

Content is not valid only because of its acceptance in existing records management systems, but because of the value it provides to the body of dialog surrounding other artifacts. It helps put those artifacts into context, helps create a web of dialog around those more permanent records -- improving the search experience, if nothing else.

But as I mentioned earlier, the tools to do this don't yet exist. I envision this as similar to the work Gorden Bell (Microsoft) was doing with his MyLifeBits project, but using a more streamlined, social computing approach.

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understand the limitations as related to your risk tolerance

Submitted by Randy Moeller August 16, 2011 - 12:31 PM

Don't get me wrong as I'm all for technology in business. It does take a while for technology to catch up with the risks businesses need to deal with. The more risk you have in a business the more tools need to do in order to minimize the risk. Companies with 400 active litigations have a lower risk tolerance than those who are rarely in court.

I also agree context is helpful but where it is needed. In the process of procurement I need contract, PO, invoice and check copy. I do not need any exchange of conversations. If they were critical, businesses would have retained the procurement related phone calls long ago.

Upstream R&D is different which is why some turned to wikis, etc. to capture conversations/thought strings. That even has a limitation as good information always lives. We all know Einstein's equation E=MC2 but have never seen his journal or heard him speak. Same for R&D as everyone knows the medicine bottle cap has to meet child proof standards so no one would look at those conversations from 40 years ago.

Business records have a value related to an event's moment-in-time and risk. That value equates to how long it needs to be kept. Some are longer, some shorter.

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we're arguing over future technology

Submitted by Christian Buckley August 16, 2011 - 1:00 PM

But you're once again putting this into the context of what you understand the system needs today. You are jumping to conclusions based on your understanding of what the business needs today, and upon the limits of what technology can deliver today. My point is that we think we don't need to capture and track these conversations today because we don't NEED to capture them today, or we don't understand yet what we can do if we COULD capture these conversations.

One of the biggest inhibitors of R&D and innovation is the boundary we put around ourselves about what we know to be true today. Yes, it may be true today, in the context of our experience. But we don't know what we don't know. And I believe there is intrinsic value in the data we are not capturing today, and social computing will help us realize that value.

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ha, thought it was about a tweet as a record

Submitted by Randy Moeller August 16, 2011 - 2:19 PM

I believe tweets are records but their value follows the same equation regardless of how it's created or what it is. Procurement record types have changed little since the advent of the Napoleonic codes but there has been a huge leap in the technology that creates and stores them. Of course the cost of the technology has had to be built into the costs business needs to cover with income. It sort of parallels why the vast majority of businesses do not have an email management system. The cost outweighs risk/value including intrinsic. Businesses do not do something because you can.

Where business finds value business presses technology to evolve and business uses technology to evolve themselves. Well at least once enough of the 'resistant' forces have changed. ;-)

I disagree on the innovation bit. Innovation's boundary is relative to the culture of your organization. The great innovative companies have little boundaries keeping their R&D folks within a stricter framework or mindset on how things are done. It continues to be a human constraint that technology cannot overcome.

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Trying to understand the post

Submitted by Derrick Fan August 17, 2011 - 3:22 AM

Hi, do correct me if I'm interpreting this wrongly:

Christian basically states his belief that
1. A Tweet is a record (even though he mentioned "Tweets are sometimes records...")
2. Few companies are capturing them - even though if "...I'm a business owner, I want to capture all forms of communication..."
3. This is because the tools are not available yet/ not mature enough to capture and classify Tweets (because of their nature)
4. Such tools to bridge that gap are needed.

I believe Christian wanted to generate a subsequent discussion more on how the "future" technologies can work to bridge that gap, rather than whether a Tweet, or a Tweet stream is or isn't a record?

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that's about right

Submitted by Christian Buckley August 17, 2011 - 10:34 AM

Whether or not a tweet meets the current definition of a record is irrelevant. I don't subscribe to the idea that just because things have always been done a certain way, that's how they'll always be done. The underlying social informatics of our web and content management systems are evolving, and new ideas are spreading.

My point here is simply:
1) The value of tweets are growing, and with the influx of technologies using Twitter as a communication platform, we're going to need to address how these messages are included in our long-term records and content management strategies.
2) The technology to accurately capture this data is not yet here. In the future, we need tools that can identify relevant tweets and corresponding threaded discussion, remove it from the public stream and place it in a private stream, allow people to tag it, associate it with other content, and apply state and policy decisions to it.

But just because we do not have the capability to capture and track a tweet as we do other records does not mean that tweets are not records. Does an organism not exist simply because we have not yet named and classified it?

My other point about innovation has been validated here: people have a difficult time visualizing solutions outside of their areas of expertise. If it wasn't that way, we'd all be patent holders.

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This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International