These personal thoughts on information management are based on my own experience, the inspiring reading of James Lappin last post on his blog Thinking Records, The state of records management in 2013: The challenges, and the ideas drawn from a webminar on “SharePoint ECM Significant Trends & Best Practices”, by Joe Shepley of Doculabs.

Those of us involved in helping organizations to manage their information find two opposing trends to live together:

• The organizations demand of concrete solutions. In words of Joe Shepley Organizations don´t want a drill, but a hole in the wall.

• The need of a governance model or development strategy prior to solution design. Continuing the metaphor a plan of what we want to hang on the wall.

Finding the balance is the great challenge. In two of my recent clients I have found that being contracted by the IT Department for the implementation of a specific ECM, I ended up convincing about the need of a governance model or framework. And of course this governance framework should go beyond the IT Department .... and scope of the project is no longer the specific solution, but without giving up and keep it on schedule .... Who said it was easy being a consultant?

In this way we have some certainties as a starting point:

• Technology is the heart of the matter. Technology has solutions, but also advances so fast that puts us in new problems. The six situations related by James Lappin on records management are technological problems.

• People still used widely shared disks as their primary method of managing unstructured content, as organizations attempt to restrict this unsecure as ineffective and costly system.

• The ECM vendors have performed in recent years a successful sales strategy especially in large organizations, that results in many organizations having more than one system to manage this type of content, in many cases as isolated and unconnected solutions.

• Small organizations do not need to have many different technologies to reproduce the pattern of islands of information, with Microsoft Sharepoint is sufficient for a proliferation of disconnected sites and subsites.

• What you propose must always be designed to add value to the organization business, and for that we need to expand the vision and don´t focus on specific aspects. Every time I find more interesting (leaving aside the problems of translation) the proposal of the Canadian delegation to the ISO TC46/SC11 to detract from talk of "records" to replace by "information of business value".