Nick Inglis

Organizations love shared drives because they're easy to set up, easy to deploy, and require little prior knowledge to utilize. Even with the best of intentions though, they easily become unwieldy and disorganized, making it harder to find information in your organization, not simpler. Beyond issues in manageability, shared drives are a hotbed of compliance and risk issues putting your organization at a substantially higher risk of non-compliance with privacy laws and a higher risk of lawsuit losses. Many organizations are considering or have decided to shut down their shared drives to move forward strategically, but how? How can you get your organization on board with killing off the shared drive? When you do, what takes its place? How can you move your organization strategically forward and away from shared drive usage?

Despite the many attempts to codify the information profession, we've been largely developing the profession with a hodgepodge of best practices and shared knowledge. Various factions, coming from different information disciplines have competing advice and different guidance with regards to the same corporate information (e.g. Records Managers vs. Data Scientists). After all of this time in the post-PC era, we've yet to have a true Information Profession. What can be done to unify the profession and our professional practices towards the development of a unified vision of the Information Professional?

Records Management continues to struggle as its' influence wanes in organizations. How can Records Management move to the next level of entrenchment, ensure it remains viable, and leverage its' knowledge to maximize the information capabilities of the organization.