BPE 2009: collaboration

Robert Vitello and Bill Travis detail the origins and goals of the New York State Economic Security and Human Services Advisory Board, Best Practices Exchange, 3 September 2009.

[I had hopes of wrapping up my Best Practices Exchange blogging last week, but life had other plans. I really wish I could say that I'm slow blogging, but unfortunately I'm merely late blogging -- and at present there's no manifesto for that.]

One of the most interesting Best Practices Exchange sessions I attended highlighted a couple of really productive collaborations.

The first presenter, Nancy Adgent of the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), discussed the Collaborative Electronic Records Project (CERP), which allowed the RAC and the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) to develop tools for the preservation of e-mail.

Although the two institutions had some common strengths -- forward-thinking and pro-active directors, similar collecting policies, and above-average staffing levels -- they differed in their governance structures, level of authority over records creators, funding streams, staffing levels, and the e-mail formats for which they were responsible. They also had to contend with the challenges posed by physical distance, the need to develop a new knowledge base, various administrative and staffing problems, and the SIA's quasi-governmental status, which eliminated several sources of funding that the RAC could have otherwise pursued.

These differences and challenges forced the RAC and the SIA to develop e-mail tools that could handle a variety of of e-mail formats. It also exposed a number of issues that other archives might encounter: inadvertent changes wrought by global software upgrades pushed out to the SIA's networked CERP computers (but not the RAC's machines, which remained offline), and differences in the capacity of various virus detection applications.

Nancy then provided a brief overview of the tools that CERP uses to process e-mail, among them Aid4Mail, which converts Microsoft PST files to Microsoft .msg format and allowed staff to identify and remove non-record messages, and various tools that convert messages in various formats to the MBOX format, which CERP's parser converts to XML for preservation purposes. She also discussed how CERP and the E-mail Collection and Preservation (EMCAP) project, which also sought to use XML to preserve e-mail, developed a common XML schema.

Nancy made a really great closing point: odd couples can produce some good offspring! Even though the RAC and the SIA produced different guidance products tailored to the needs of their respective donor communities and their own institution-specific workflow processes, procedures, and forms, they developed and tested common tools for processing and preserving e-mail. And they look like really great tools! We're anticipating a transfer of e-mail pretty soon, and I'm really looking forward to giving CERP's parser a spin.

The next presentation was delivered by two New York State agency CIO's -- Bill Travis of the Office of Children and Family Services and Robert Vitello of the Department of Labor -- and focused on the work of the New York State Economic Security and Human Services Advisory Board. It underscored how shared problems can sometimes give rise to really effective collaboration.

Several years before the State CIO took office, the State had purchased a suite of out-of-the-box products that had been purchased to manage various human services programs and services. CIOs of agencies that were using these products had begun meeting to discuss that problems they encountered as they tried to make these products fit the State's county-administred, state-supervised model of service provision.

The agencies ultimately informed the State CIO that they would not use these products, and she accepted their decision. However, she also challenged them to develop an enterprise-wide approach. For years, the federal government has forced state human services agencies to construct IT silos, but the situation has changed in recent years, and there is real potential for cost savings is (the board's member agencies account for 70 percent -- approximately $1 billion per year -- of the State's IT expenditures)

The board has established a series of guiding principles:

• Provide for interoperability using open standards and seamless data sharing through common enterprise systems.
• Deploy an "Open New York" community approach to facilitate peer review and enhance quality control.
• Leverage prior IT investments with software reuse when feasible to achieve greater cost efficiencies.
• Implement agile systems development approaches to improve speed to market
• Establish strong enterprise governance to ensure alignment of technology plans with business goals
• Seek innovative collaborations to leverage State enterprise IT resources and assets

More information about these guiding principles is outlined in the board's January 2008 strategy document, and information about the board's work appears in its September 2009 progress report.

I was really struck by how Travis, Vitello, and the other board members were able to capitalize on their willingness to pool their expertise and share information. Thanks to this combination of characteristics -- plus strong support from the State CIO -- they've been able to make real headway, and it will be interesting to see how their work evolves. I get the sense that my employer will be well-positioned to do so: the board is just starting to focus on e-discovery and its relationship to records management.

BPE 2009: Did You Know ?

Dr. Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, the Chief Information Officer of New York State, spoke at the Best Practices Exchange on the morning of 2 September. She prefaced her talk, which concerned the State's Strategy for Openness and its Empire 2.0 social networking initiative, with this video, Did You Know ? 3.0.

The Did You Know ? series, which is jointly produced by The Economist and XPLANE, presents facts and statistics concerning recent changes in media, communications, and technology. They don't address concerns specific to electronic records archivists or digital librarians, but they provide a quick, compelling, and unnerving overview of the information ecosystem in which we exist.



Yesterday, XPLANE released Did You Know? 4.0. Thanks to Jean Green for posting this link on Facebook!

BPE 2009: managing change

Fynette Eaton defines "change" and "transition," Best Practices Exchange, 3 September 2009.

Shortly after I became an electronic records archivist, I attended Partnerships in Innovation: Serving a Networked Nation, a conference sponsored by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). One of the speakers, a scientist who helped to develop the Open Archival Information System Reference Model said something that has stayed with me ever since: the greatest digital preservation challenges we face are not technological but sociological. In other words, conflicts over terminology, turf, roles, and responsibilities can be and often are the thorniest problems we face. As time passes, I'm increasingly convinced that he was right.

Fynette Eaton's exhilarating session at this year's Best Practices Exchange made me think about some of the sociological challenges that we confront within our own institutions. Using NARA's Electronic Records Archives (ERA) program, which will enable NARA to preserve and provide access to the archival records of federal government and to modernize its scheduling, accessioning, and other workflows, as an example, Fynette discussed the principles of change management. She emphasized that although most administrators fail to realize it, implementing new procedures and new technologies and overcoming resistance to change are fundamentally human resources, not technological, issues.

Fynette began by emphasizing the difference between change and transition (see above) and outlining the three phases of the transition process:

• Ending: letting go of the old way of doing things and the sense of comfort, familiarity, and confidence in one's own expertise that comes with having mastered the old way, saying goodbye to the old way and one's old sense of self, and achieving some sort of closure.
• In-between time: feeling as if one is lost in the wilderness. This phase is often difficult, but it also results in the generation of new ideas about how to do things and about the self.
• New chapter: the sense that one has mastered the new way of doing things, often accompanied by a sense of personal and organizational renewal.

Not surprisingly, it's the process of transition, not the change itself, that people most often resist. The sense that one's identity and worldview are being questioned, the chaos of the in-between phase, and the risk of failure that accompanies any new beginning are all deeply unpleasant.

When I first became an electronic records archivist, I started thinking about what separated me from the colleagues who privately told me that they were glad they were still working with paper records or that they would retire within a few years. My colleagues consistently talked about their lack of comfort with technology or our (minor) differences in age, but more and more I came to realize that, in many instances, the most significant difference was my relatively high level of tolerance for chaos and uncertainty. I don't think I enjoy the transition process any more than anyone else, but I'm willing to live with it -- and to set the process in motion -- if I think that the stakes are high enough.

Of course, dealing with the immense and complex challenge of digital preservation requires more than a few librarians and archivists who can deal with a certain degree of chronic upheaval. This session was full of information about how to implement sweeping changes effectively and humanely.

Fynette identified the key success factors for implementing change:

• Alignment of and visible support from the organization's executive team, including senior managers. Without visible, consistent support from the executive team, change won't succeed.
• Formation of a change management team charged with planning and preparing for implementation of the desired change.
• Consistent communication with employees, including early involvement of employees in pilot testing and other parts of the change process; research indicates that key points need to be communicated a minimum of seven times (!)
• Frequent communication and negotiation with stakeholders, which for archives and libraries include end users and creators of records and publications.

She also detailed the greatest obstacles to change:

• Employee and staff resistance.
• Middle management resistance -- a significant factor at NARA.
• Poor executive sponsorship.
• Limited time, budget, and resources.
• Organizational inertia and politics -- also in play at NARA.

Reviews and audits that track measurable progress can help overcome opposition from external stakeholders, and direct one-on-one contact and pressure from peers who accept the need for change can help to alleviate internal opposition; removing tools and systems that sustain "the old way" of doing things can also eliminate resistance, but this step should be taken only after everyone has been properly trained to use the new system.

Fynette devoted most of the session to NARA's efforts to manage the changes that accompanied the development of ERA, which ought to serve as a model for other cultural heritage institutions making similar changes.

NARA's change management team was responsible for:

• Keeping NARA running while ERA was being built.
• Building and sustaining the momentum needed to set changes in motion.
  
• Dealing with the human dimension of organizational change.
• Managing NARA's transition to a new and sustainable way of doing business.
  

The team, which developed a NARA-wide plan and compiled and continually updated a "global assessment" of progress, learned several lessons that are, in my view, broadly applicable:

1. Clarity and consistency of vision are essential. NARA leaders' perceptions of ERA's scope and mission were inconsistent and varied over time, and some leaders had difficulty sticking to decisions that had been made during earlier phases of the project. Averting endless review of past decisions -- which in some instances wa a form of resistance -- was particularly important.

2. A variety of users must participate in the testing and pilot phases of system development. Doing so helps to ensure that all users feel as if they have a voice and that problems are identified and solved before the system's agency-wide rollout.

3. Communications must be actively managed:

• Staff needed reassurance that ERA's implementation would not cause NARA's operations to grind to a halt and that they would not lose their jobs as a result of the change. The team frequently met with staff and encouraged them to discuss their concerns. It also identified champions -- people who, regardless of their official position within NARA's hierarchy, had the respect of their colleagues and who could persuade others to support ERA.
• External stakeholders, whose perceptions of NARA often differ sharply from NARA's perception of itself, also needed confirmation that ERA was on track. The team helped to bolster ERA's credibility by emphasizing NARA's extensive and ongoing involvement in cutting-edge digital preservation research. (I've always been deeply impressed with ERA's research component, and I was both stunned and amused to learn that NARA has actively nurtured this perception.)

Those of us who care passionately about digital preservation have no choice but to address the change management issues that Fynette Eaton highlighted. In the short term, change management might seem less important than finding and testing the technical tools needed to acquire, preserve, and provide access to electronic records and digital publications. However, if our senior managers and our colleagues don't buy into the changes in workflow and, in some instances, organizational structure that digital preservation requires, our institutions -- and archivy and librarianship -- will suffer greatly in the long term. NARA's started tackling some of the sociological challenges of digital preservation, and the rest of us have to do the same.

Best Practices Exchange 2009

Group photo of Best Practices Exchange attendees, 4 September 2009.

The 2009 BPE wrapped up yesterday at around noon, and everyone seems to have been pretty happy with the way it turned out. Over the next few days, I'm going to post about various sessions and the many things I learned at this year's BPE. However, today I'm going to take it easy, catch up on a few things I've had to put aside during the past few weeks, and savor the spectacular weather.

2009 Best Practices Exchange, day two

Morning session, Best Practices Exchange, 3 September 2009.

Although today was a lot less hectic than yesterday, at least for me, my head is still so full of ideas that I really can't blog at length about everything that transpired. As a result, I'm just going to pass on a couple of intriguing points made by this morning's speaker, Theresa Pardo of the Center for Technology in Government:

• There is a growing need for people who have both information technology/computer science skills and domain knowledge (e.g., knowledge of the financial market), but universities are just starting to meet it.
  

• People like to solve problems, but sometimes this approach isn't appropriate. For example, it's pretty easy to get funding for mobile devices that will enable child protection workers to intervene before a child is killed, but it's a lot harder to get funding for a data system that could identify troubling family developments before they reach crisis proportions. What we really need to do is manage child abuse and other tangled problems -- those problems that are poorly structured, resource- and information-intensive, involve multiple stakeholders, and are characterized by social and political complexity -- not as problems to be solved but as dilemmas that must be managed collaboratively.

2009 Best Practices Exchange, day one

Morning session, 2009 Best Practices Exchange, 2 September 2009.

I simply don't have much energy to assemble a post tonight: I'm one of the co-chairs of the Planning Committee, did quite a bit of emceeing, and delivered a presentation this afternoon. I'm worn out, and I'm headed off to bed very, very soon, so I'm simply going to share what was, in my view, the most intriguing and eminently practical idea of the day.

Tom Clareson of Lyrasis delivered an excellent keynote address that focused on the findings of several NEDCC and other surveys of digital preservation practices and policies in various types of cultural heritage institutions. The news was pretty sobering: most institutions don't even have basic policies governing metadata, quality control, etc. Tom heavily stressed that policies governing digitization, digital disaster recovery, and other facets of digital preservation, and asserted that institutions should devote attention to basic policy matters before trying to tackle, e.g., building a trusted digital repository.

I like writing policy, and I think Tom's absolutely right. However, I have all sorts of competing demands on my time, so I asked him how someone like me could balance the need to develop comprehensive policies and the need to do things like write series descriptions and identify mystery files.

Tom had a number of suggestions, but the first one he offered was utterly brilliant in its simplicity: have an intern shadow you for a week and write down everything you do, and you'll have the basics of a policy document. The more I think about it, the more it makes perfect sense: it's a low- to no-cost approach, and if your intern is both willing and able to ask "why?" all of the time, it forces you to make explicit all of the assumptions and experiences that guide your actions -- and may propel you to question some of those assumptions. Moreover, if you're any good at what you do, your intern will learn a lot!

2009 Best Practices Exchange program now available

At last . . . the program for the 2009 Best Practices Exchange, which brings together archivists, librarians, information technology professionals, and others interested in preserving and providing access to digital state government information, is now online!

Thinking of presenting at the Best Practices Exchange?

If you're interested in presenting at the 2009 Best Practices Exchange (BPE), which will be held in Albany, New York from 2-4 September, keep in mind that Wednesday, 5 August is the deadline for submitting a presentation proposal. Proposals should be one or two paragraphs in length and include a title and information about the track(s) to which your presentation belongs. For more information, see the 2009 Best Practices Exchange Proposals page.

The BPE brings together archivists, attorneys, information technology professionals, librarians, educators, product developers, records managers, and others interested in the management and preservation of digital information in state government. For more information about the BPE, consult the BPE Web site. Also, be sure to check out the BPE's presence on Facebook!

Best Practices Exchange 2009 Web site is live

The Web site for the 2009 Best Practices Exchange (BPE) went live today.

The BPE is an annual event that brings together archivists, attorneys, information technology professionals, librarians, educators, product developers, records managers, and others interested in the management and preservation of digital information in state government.

The 2009 Best Practices Exchange will be held at the University at Albany, SUNY on 2-4 September. Registration, lodging, and other information about the 2009 BPE is available via the Web site.

Kudos to my colleague Sarah Durling, who devoted a substantial chunk of her free time to creating this very attractive site!

2009 Best Practices Exchange: call for proposals

The University at Albany, SUNY has issued the call for proposals for the 2009 Best Practices Exchange. It's making its way onto listservs targeting state government electronic records archivists, digital librarians, electronic records managers, and IT professionals. Just in case you haven't seen it yet, here it is . . . .

CALL FOR SESSION PROPOSALS: 4TH ANNUAL BEST PRACTICES EXCHANGES (BPE)

We are seeking proposals for sessions to be presented at the 4th annual Best Practices Exchange (BPE), which will be held in Albany, New York, at the University at Albany, SUNY, on September 2-4, 2009. The BPE is a conference that focuses on the management of digital information in state government, and it brings together practitioners to discuss their real-world experiences, including best practices and lessons learned. The theme of this year's BPE is "Tackling Technology Together." Its focus will be on collaboration between and within branches of state government, and between librarians, archivists, records managers, information technology professionals, and others concerned with managing state digital assets.

This year's conference has four tracks. Each track is enumerated below, along with a list of themes embraced by each track. We ask that potential speakers be guided, but not limited, by the themes indicated. Each session will be 90 minutes long.

1) Finding Funding: securing support, developing a marketing strategy, unexpected funding sources, and advocacy

2) Creative Collaboration: finding common ground, a seat at the table, and unexpected partners; crossing professional boundaries; fostering leadership; building communities; and sustaining collaboration

3) Educating Each Other: learning new technical skills and new "soft" skills, learning each others' language, and ensuring professional development

4) Living Without Closure: morphing from project to program, defining "finished," planning for an unknown future, finding new uses for old ideas and tools, and managing change

Please send all session proposals to Brian Keough, Head of the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany, SUNY, bkeough[at]uamail.albany.edu. The deadline for submission is July 15, 2009.

2009 Best Practices Exchange

FYI, the fourth Best Practices Exchange (BPE) will be held at the University at Albany, SUNY, on September 2-4, 2009. The Best Practices Exchange brings together state government librarians, archivists, records managers, and other information professionals and enables them to discuss issues, challenges, and solutions to managing digital state government information. More information about the 2009 Best Practices Exchange will be posted to the BPE Web site as it becomes available.