A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?
The rapid pace of change in Records and Information Management means that decision makers are frequently required to evaluate project proposals from information management professionals that have serious implications for their organisations. There are never enough resources available to fund more than a small fraction of the proposals (particularly in times of economic downturn) and decision makers are keenly aware that the size of the resource pool is limited and that every pound spent on infrastructure and administration is a pound not spent on ‘primary production’ of whatever the organisation's purpose is. Costs of projects are relatively straight-forward to define, but benefits that are not expressed in financial terms can be very difficult to communicate and measure. These intangible benefits are frequently a major feature of the benefits of records management and consequently the business cases are often expressed in vague prosaic language.
This session will offer an opportunity to engage with these important issues and approaches that can help communicate intangible benefits in such a way that informed and transparent decisions can be made for the benefit of the organisation. It will not shy away from the economic background to the issue of understanding intangibles, an approach such as that developed by the espida project, and examples of how such an approach can be used successfully in different types of organisation.
How are business cases for resources made within your organisation? Are hours spent carefully crafting purple prose to convince senior management about the merits of your work, which they don't really read? Do management find it hard to understand the benefits of the proposal and want it on a single page of A4?
James was the director of the espida project at the University of Glasgow and whilst the espida Approach was developed with an eye to for securing resources for actions to preserve digital materials (and the implementation of processes for records management or sustaining an institution repository), any business case that must convey outcomes that are not purely financial can benefit from applying the principles on which its methodology is based.
James will help you to understand how to get the attention that your work deserves and although your organisation may already allow you to get the resources that you think records management needs, if it doesn't then you might be glad that you spent and hour in this session. James is known for having rather iconoclstic views and you can be certain that it if it turns out to be an hour of one person talking from behind a lectern that you went to the wrong room or the organisers recruited someone else of the same name to lead the session by mistake.
Dr James Currall, University of GlasgowJames Currall has been employed in the University of Glasgow for almost 20 years. His main job currently is as Director of Information Strategy where he interacts with records managers, archivists, librarians, information technologists, academics and university managers. From a... more...
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