Worth Reading – RIM Is Moving Upstream

In the link below, Andrew is writing about ISO/IEC/IEEE AWI 42030, which isn’t about RIM, but he thinks it has significant implications for records professionals:

AWI 42030 reflects a broader industry transition: away from records as static, discrete objects and toward records as emergent properties of complex digital architectures. That transition has real implications for what competencies the profession needs to develop. Architectural literacy, systems thinking, AI governance frameworks, interoperability design, metadata architecture, and evidentiary systems analysis are not optional additions to the RIM skill set. They are becoming core to it.

https://metaarchivist.substack.com/p/rim-is-moving-upstream

I think this is correct, and I say that not because I am intimately educated on the subject, but because I see what technology like AI is doing, and I have to think about what that means for Information Governance in the law firm space. That is, after all, my day job.

The thing I see more and more is technology moving away from a document-centered workflow. When people freaked out about Office.com opening with Copilot instead of showing them links to Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc., it was a massive change. They didn’t like it. With the benefit of hindsight, I look back and see it as one more step away from being document-centric.

Instead of starting your work in a blank Word document or spreadsheet, start in Copilot chat, then move it to a Copilot page, which is a Loop file. From there, you drop part of the page, a component, into chat for live collaboration with your team, or you work together in the Loop app, with Copilot assisting again and drop the new draft into an email, linked to the web version for easier editing by the entire team, until finally, at the very end of this process, you create a PDF of the final product, and add it to your “records” location.

Thus, only the final version ever gets stored as a record. All the prior versions are gone. Work that is still in progress is not a record, but accessible to AI tools. This is the conundrum for RIM. Increasingly, creating policy and procedure around data and records is about the stuff that isn’t in the final form in a document management system; it’s about all the other copies and versions in OneDrive, email, chat, meetings, etc.

Ignoring those and pretending that the only version that matters for RIM is the final one is naïve. That’s not how this works. We would do well to consider integrating your tech infrastructure and RIM groups sooner rather than later. They need each other.

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