Thursday 10 February 2011

A day of two halves

Yesterday was pretty hectic, as I rushed from the office in the morning to an ARMA Europe seminar in the afternoon to the SLA Europe Winter Warmer Quiz in the evening!

AMRA Europe Seminar

The ARMA event was held at the Ritz, sponsored by Autonomy, so a groups of records managers in their Sunday best enjoyed coffee/tea served in real china cups and saucers, while being served mini-high tea style nibbles (the tiny apple strudel come filo parcels with chocolate dipping sauce were particularly scrumptious!) on glass platters by a bevy of black suited waiters.  All very impressive and decadent.

All too soon, however, we were ushered through into another room, similarly swagged and gilded, to listed to what turned out to be some very interesting and informative talks.

First up was Galina Datskovsky, SVP Information Governance at Autonomy from the USA, and president-elect of ARMA International this year.  Galina gave an indepth review of the GARP standard (Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles) with some entertaining anecdotes of issues organisations can get themselves into without sound RM policies in place.  She said one indicator that RM isn't very developed at an organisation is where the records management team reports into Facilities, whereas an indicator of a more advanced programme could be where a committee of legal, compliance, IT, RM and users meets regularly to set policies and strategies.

Second to speak was Jon Guard of the DLM Forum and author of MoReq 2010.  He spoke about the difference between standards which set out principals, like GARP or ISO 25489, and those which are intended to be used to create functional specifications, like MoReq or TNA 2002.  Jon described the modular nature of the reviesed MoReq standard, which is designed to cope with the need for interoperability between systems and the specific requirements of differently regulated sectors.

SLA Europe Quiz

After a swift dash across town to the City, I met up with a group of colleagues from Fabric and we prepared to face Tony's scary questions.

Amid much hilarity and overly-loud whispers (well shouts in some cases) of the answers (which probably didn't help anyone around us, to be honest, since most of them were wrong), we managed to come storming into last place.  As this meant a 'booby' prize of six books to share amongst the team we weren't too gutted however!

In a change from previous years pizza was replaced by platters of nibbles - including chicken nuggets, sandwiches, nachos and chips.  This went down very well, as did the new table allocation system.  Great fun was had by all, and I only just managed to catch my 10.20 train home.

- Nicola Franklin

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