Treating your e-mail as an information silo is based on a very simple misconception that this information is ‘my information’. Your information is at home; at work you are the caretaker or custodian of your employer’s information, i.e. RCSI’s information.
Therefore, by rights, that RCSI information must be accessible to all who are involved with it – to your manager, their manager and your other colleagues. We need to dissuade ourselves from the concept of ‘my data’. You are the custodian of College information, developed by College staff to help with service provision.
Dave Stafford, Data & Technical Standards Officer, Stirling Council, says: ‘I routinely see e-mail accounts and/or e-mail archives that contain not months, but years of obsolete useless information. Documents, attachments and information which are all utterly useless as a result of the change that went on in the outside world.’ If the original information is out of date (costs, estimates, quotes) then there is no point in saving a document for months in your e-mail and then expecting to make a reliable decision based on out of date data weeks or months later.
According to Stafford: ‘hiding this old information away because you think it will save you time because you won’t have to re-make it, is a naive train of thought. It will kill you because if you pull out a 90-day old document and accept its information as gospel, you are being both naive and foolish.’
So what can be done?
It is possible to make a huge positive change by taking a few simple steps:
• Cease internal e-mail attachments, i.e. to people within your own department or project (thus drastically reducing the problem of duplicates and near-duplicates)
• Instead of attachments, set up shared, collaborative workspaces where each document exists in a single, controlled location (ask the Records Manager or IT about this)
• Properly identify draft or version numbers for each document
• Use a standardised folder structure in your shared drives so that documents are stored in a manner that allows them to be located and retrieved (talk to the Records & Information Compliance Manager)
• Use agreed standard naming for documents, including date, version and other identifying elements (talk to the Records & Information Compliance Manager or see the procedures on the staff portal)
• Do not keep information in e-mail systems or other data silos such as personal drives, local drives, memory sticks, etc.
This briefing is adapted from ‘Quality, accuracy, consistency (what’s happened to them?)’ by Dave Stafford, Data & Technical Standards Officer, Stirling Council, Information and Records Management Society Bulletin, Issue 173, May 2013 (by permission of the author).