When Associations Edit the Past

I'm a bit peeved, personally and professionally, about a disturbing turn of events I've now seen with two of my associations, AIIM and ARMA. It seems that both of them have taken to editing previously published content without disclosing that fact. It's their content, so it's their right to edit it, but it seems a bit...unseemly to do so without disclosing that they are doing so. 

I consider Nick Inglis to be a professional colleague and a friend. He's done some incredible stuff over the years to move the disciplines of information governance and information management forward, and while I don't agree with all of his actions, I know they are coming from a genuine desire to raise the visibility and efficacy of information professionals. 

On October 22, 2021, he noted that ARMA had removed all of his bylines from their assets. Where they used to have his name, now they simply show "ARMA International". You can see an example in this post: https://magazine.arma.org/2021/02/whats-next-in-information-governance-continuous-audit-and-analytics/. Note the byline, dated February 1, 2021. Now click the link to download the article, and you end up here: https://magazine.arma.org/article_-whats-next-in-ig_-continuous-audit-and-analytics/, which clearly shows Nick's byline. 

At the same time, here's an example Nick cites of an article written by Jeff Whited, who left ARMA several months earlier than Nick did: https://magazine.arma.org/2019/06/goals-of-new-canadian-digital-charter-include-assuring-privacy-eradicating-hate-online/. I did do some searching around for other departed staffers and it may be that ARMA has decided to remove individual staff bylines, and simply missed the article by Whited. But again it would not have appeared as petty had ARMA made some sort of announcement about it. 

For my part, I've seen a lot of edits to posts I wrote for AIIM in the past as well. For example, I wrote a post comparing AIIM and ARMA memberships in April 2020. I looked at it today in reference to another post, and noticed that many, but not all, of the training and membership references now refer to AIIM+ and AIIM+ Pro. Which is fine, though I think the post date should have been updated, or at least a note to that effect added to the post (e.g. "This post was updated in October 2021 to reflect AIIM's change to the AIIM+ and AIIM+ Pro model."). That's just the right thing to do when updating a post in my opinion. 

But what makes it worse is that some of the edits make the posts distinctly more sales-y. And at the same time, no edits were made to the current number of professional members, or the drop from 16 online chapters in the community to 7, including the closure of all non-US chapters except AIIM True North in Canada. If you're going to edit for accuracy, I think you need to be consistent and edit for accuracy all the way around. 

I no longer have any visibility into AIIM's finances, marketing efforts, etc. but I have to wonder at the time spent to update nearly every blog post I wrote in the last couple of years - mostly to change calls to action to AIIM+, but some to change training descriptions to AIIM+ from e.g. the Modern Records Management course - and whether that's really making an impact on AIIM's revenue. And it's probably not just my posts that were edited like this - so what's the ROI on doing that editing compared to all the other things the marketing team could have been doing? 

So, for anyone from AIIM or ARMA reading this, what's my recommendation? First, don't edit stuff you've already published unless you need to clean up specific errors or links that are now broken. Second, if you're going to edit, have the courage of your convictions to edit all the obvious errors or changes in the resource. Third, if you're going to edit, NOTE THAT FACT in the resource that's been edited. Or keep stealth editing, and lose more of your credibility. We notice. 

ARMA Canada Western Chapters Looking for Speakers for November 2022 Conference

Update: Updated due date to Jan 7, 2022. 

The five westernmost ARMA chapters in Canada are hosting a conference October 5-7, 2022 in Kelowna, BC. They are actively soliticing speakers and sponsors for the event; the call for speakers is open through January 7, 2022. 

For more information on speaking or sponsoring, visit http://vancouver.arma.org/2022-kelowna-conference.html.

Transparency in Association Pricing

In a recent post on the Pricing for Associations blog, Dr. Michael Tatonetti asked a provocative question, "How Do We Talk About Price without Talking About Price?" He made a couple of key arguments: 

1. Pricing provides financial sustainability for an association. Charge too little, and you don't have the wherewithal to survive recessions, pandemics, etc. 
2. Pricing and financial sustainability allow associations to do whatever it is they do.  

He notes, 

"I don't know about you, but I am a member of other associations, and I want to pay my dues. I want to pay to go to luncheons. I want to pay to go to annual conferences. I want to pay for continuing education because I not only want the value that I get from that, but I also want to empower my organizations to do even more work and reach new members, and reach new sponsors, and be sustainable, so that I can continue going back and getting what I need from them." 

I generally agree with these points. In particular, I agree with paying the fees myself, so much so in fact that I paid my membership at an association for more than 10 years, even though I was HQ staff, and even after I got lifetime membership as a Fellow. 

However, there's another consideration, which is that some people, including some of an association's audience, think that non-profits should give everything away, probably work for free or minimum wage, etc. It's not universal, of course, and there are associations that charge pretty stiff fees so they can have HQ upgrades, staff bonuses & premium pay, etc. 

Similarly, people aren't transparent about pricing because it will scare customers off. I saw this all the time with training, even though a survey of more than 70 different training programs showed that that association's training pricing was exactly inline with what others were charging - competitors, solution-specific training, complementary training, all of them. Some of this goes to self-funded vs. "need to submit for reimbursement"-level costs, but confidence in pricing also shows confidence in the product.

Finally, I think a lot of associations are hesitant to talk about price because they think they'll get undercut by their competition. This has always struck me as silly because at some point they do have to give customers a price, and it's a few seconds to Tweet or post that to LinkedIn. I subscribe more to the Marcus Sheridan "They Ask, You Answer" school of thought. That is, post pricing wherever possible, and if pricing is highly variable, post what pieces you can with an explanation of the variables. That also means that you shouldn't be hiding pricing behind a registration screen - I see this all the time with conferences where either the conference fees, the conference designated hotel fees, or both require prospective attendees to provide a ton of information first. 

ARMA Houston Announces Call for Speakers for Spring Seminar 2022

I normally don't post about individual chapters like this, but ARMA Houston is one of a handful of chapters that offer conference-like spring seminars - numerous vendors in an expo area, multiple tracks of speakers, etc. I very much enjoyed the opportunities I had to present at, and participate in, ARMA Houston's spring seminars in years past. I would plan to go again this year except that it's the same dates as AIIM22. 

The conference is scheduled for April 26-27, 2022 in Houston. Submission deadline is Dec 20, 2021. For additional details, or to submit, visit https://www.armahouston.org/page/2022_Speakers. 

IBM Cloud: Process Mining vs. Process Modeling vs. Process Mapping

IBM Cloud: Process mining, process modeling and process mapping are distinct, but related, methods of visualizing and analyzing business processes. To keep reading: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/process-mining-vs-process-modeling-vs-process-mapping 

However, see the pushback from Mark McGregor and William Thomas on the LinkedIn post here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gregorypollack_process-mining-vs-process-modeling-vs-process-activity-6851716206127300608--5nY

How to Determine the Ownership of Information Stores

It's a key outcome of any system inventory, data map, system map, etc.: who owns a particular system or information store? Let me start by saying it's rarely IT - they provision, support, maintain, upgrade, update, and eventually decommission systems. But they don't own them - rather, they are custodians for them on behalf of the organization generally and the business process the system supports. 

In other words, it's generally the business process owner that owns a given system. Sales owns the sales forecasting system. Marketing owns the marketing automation system. IT *does* own the help desk ticket system. For systems that are generally enterprise-wide, like email, an argument can be made that IT should be considered their owners, but I believe that in this case the owner is either the CIO or another member of executive management - perhaps even the CEO. 

But organizations change. Systems get consolidated across multiple departments. Business units and work processes get reorganized, and merged, and split apart. This can lead to systems, and the information they hold, being orphaned, without a defined owner. If the result of the reorganization is that a system is decommissioned, and its data dealt with appropriately according to existing information and data governance policies, this isn't an issue. However, it's quite common when doing an inventory to find folders, applications, and entire systems where no owner can be identified. So what is to be done with them? 

There are a couple of ways to track down the ownership of an ostensibly orphaned or abandoned information store. 

Ask someone. It's pretty unusual for a system, and the information it stores, to be completely unknown to anyone in the organization. If the system isn't decades out of date, you may still have someone on staff who remembers the system and its purpose. Then you can assign ownership to whoever owns that function today. If the function has been completely done away with (not just renamed), you may need to go to legal to explain the circumstances and figure out the right way to proceed. 

Ask IT, records management, and legal. IT should know about all the systems that are or were on their network or that they supported. Records management should have a records and information management inventory that identifies systems that could potentially generate or store records. Legal may have a data map from previous litigation. All of these could provide valuable clues about a particular system or information store, especially if any of these groups keeps previous versions. 

Examine the system. Databases have database definitions, and data dictionaries, and can probably be queried by a competent database analyst to determine what data they hold. For unstructured systems, such as abandoned network file shares and folders, someone with appropriate access rights can review the contents of those information stores to at least get a sense of what they deal with. For an abandoned email inbox, it may be as simple as drafting a new email and seeing what comes up in the signature block. Again, if the function persists, the system can be assigned to that function; if not, check with legal. 

Run a report. Most repositories and databases have audit logs that track things like date last accessed and who accessed them. There are dozens of tools that can do this for networked file shares as well. These can provide valuable insight into potential ownership. And if nobody has accessed that data or that system for 5, 7, 10+ years? Great point to make to legal. 

Do some research. This approach assumes that, not only can you not find an owner, but you can't even determine what the system is - think legacy, deprecated applications, old databases, or unknown file formats. Do your due diligence - there are tools online that can potentially identify unknown file formats by their extensions. But if you can't even access the information on the system to figure out what it is, it clearly has no business value, and you're at even greater risk in the event of litigation or an audit. Document your work and take it to legal. 

Turn it off. This one I recommend as a last resort and at your own career risk. If you truly can't figure out who owns a particular system - nobody will claim it, nobody wants it, several groups point fingers at each other asserting *their* responsibility for it - this will get you a response one way or another. 

Turn off access to the system. 

Whoever screams about it first, or loudest, is the new owner! And if nobody screams about it for a week, a month, three months, etc., that's a pretty good indicator that the system and the information it contains no longer has current business value. The fact that you turned off access 90 days ago and nobody complained is a pretty powerful data point to be able to take to legal. 

Before you act....

In every instance, before you do something that cannot be reversed, it's important to talk to your legal team (and probably risk management and compliance as well, if you have them). Ordinarily I'd include the records team in this as well, but absent ownership of a system or the ability to determine its use, there's not going to be much for records management to do here. 

AIIM+ Launches

I noted last month that AIIM announced a new approach called AIIM+ that introduces a couple of significant changes. First, Professional membership has been replaced by a subscription model. 

AIIM+ is available in two tiers - AIIM+ and AIIM+ Pro. The latter includes unlimited access to AIIM's training offerings for an extra $33/month. AIIM+ is live as I type this. 

It's not super-intuitive how to access the updated AIIM+ training content - when I click Education/My Courses from the AIIM home page, it takes me to the prior learning portal with all my old course content. I did see an AIIM tweet announcing AIIM+ and taking me to this page: https://www.aiim.org/aiim-plus. From there, there is a button that says Browse the Training Library; clicking that takes me to the new course listings. 

I got the email announcement around 10 am Mountain time, but it was pretty brief and left me with a number of questions I don't yet see addressed. I did check the FAQ at the bottom of the landing page as well. 

What happens to the long-form courses like MRMM and FIIM? They aren't listed on the website anymore, but I still have access to them in my current (old) learning portal account, which isn't surprising given the need to transition. Maybe there will be future communications that address an end of life date for the old portal and content, and how non-Pro or even non-AIIM+ persons will gain access to their transcripts and CIP status. I'm also curious as to the impact AIIM+ will have on existing training partners. 

Related, for FIIM in particular, I wonder what this means for CIP, given that FIIM was *the* prep course to prepare for the exam. The newly launched content covers some of the same topics, but it does not cover 100% of the exam content as FIIM did. AIIM+ may come to cover all of CIP at some point, but I can state with confidence that it does not at present. 

What happens to the external courses developed by AIIM partners like Practical AI and Confident Change Management? They aren't listed in the updated course listings either. 

When students complete AIIM+ courses, will there be some sort of certificate, or badge, or credential? What happens to the legacy Specialist and Master designations? 

How does CIP interact with AIIM+? So far I'm not seeing any changes; on the new landing page, there is this benefit of AIIM+: "Prove to your boss, co-workers, and yourself that you know your stuff by getting certified." 

I continue to wish AIIM success with AIIM+. Full disclosure - as an AIIM Fellow I was granted a free AIIM+ (not Pro) subscription in perpetuity, but I don't currently plan to get the Pro subscription so I won't know what that content actually looks like.