ARMA and Information Coalition Merge

Full disclosure: I still work at AIIM. As with everything I post here, nothing in this post reflects the views of AIIM management or staff.

After a couple weeks of teasing a big announcement, ARMA delivered a webinar today that provided updates in four key areas. I'm going to take them in a different order from how they were delivered.

1. Student membership. Effective October 22, ARMA will offer $25 Professional memberships to full-time students in a degree-granting program. Lots of questions about this - what about part-time students? What about retirees?

2. The release of the full Information Governance Body of Knowledge, aka iGBOK, sometime between now and the ARMA Live! 2018 conference this month. They noted that PMBOK was a significant factor in moving project management from a role to a profession and they are hoping to follow suit.

3. The app. Most conferences now have an event app that attendees can use to connect with others, share updates, etc. ARMA has taken it one step further and released an ARMA app which includes the event app functionality within it. The events calendar is nice, as is the membership directory; there is a social feed but I wonder how many people will think to post to it as opposed to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

4. The big news: ARMA and Information Coalition have merged. Nick Inglis is now an executive director (read: VP) and owns training, certification, content, and events. Jim Merrifield also joined ARMA's staff in a business development role. As might be expected there were a ton of questions about this on the webinar. Some of the key points:

• All of IC's assets are now owned by ARMA. 
• No changes to chapters, since IC doesn't have them, or how ARMA is structured (501(c)(6)). 
• Paid IC membership will be normalized with ARMA membership in some fashion. 
• The InfoBOK is owned by ARMA and will remain available, though it might be rebranded so as to avoid confusion with iGBOK and with having two BOKs.
• The INFO designation may stay or may morph into something else, but it was clarified on the call that it's a certificate program, not a certification. Related, there are no plans to make it one or to release any other certifications in the near future. 
• Nothing was mentioned about IC's two Fellows, Laurence Hart and Delores Madrid. They don't fit the traditional profile of an ARMA Fellow and probably wouldn't have all the points required to meet the requirements; on the other hand, when AIIM merged with CIIMS, all of those Fellows became Fellows of AIIM. 
• No decisions made yet about the future of InfoGovCon. Jocelyn Gunter did just post on Twitter that "For now we will have one event location with both brands and spirits represented but both will evolve to meet the needs of the profession."

Oddly, there is no information on either the ARMA home page or the Information Coalition home page about the merger. It's not posted to either one's Twitter feed, either, though IC has retweeted some others' tweets about it. IGGuru.net has a brief post but that's it. 

So that's the announcement, but what does it mean? I'm not sure. ARMA and Info Coalition are so different that it just might work. On the other hand, they're really different and it will be interesting to see how this goes, both from an ARMA HQ/staff perspective and how it is perceived by ARMA's membership. 

Personally and professionally I hope it works out for ARMA and everyone involved in the merger. I think some interesting things could come from it. 

Laurence Hart shared his thoughts about the merger on CMSWire.