To implement and sustain a significant change, there will be required support and involvement of the employees of the organization. It is imperative that change management is taken into account throughout the RIM program.

Some items to consider:
• Develop an assessment that includes change readiness, risk and cultural elements.
• Determine how the change will impact your people, process and tools.
• Establish the governance to create the vision and strategy of the change.
• Create communication, training, mitigation and action plans.
• Identify and engage early adopters to support workforce acceptance of the change.
• Involve employees as early as possible.
• Customize compliance procedures to measure adoption of the change.
• Create a recognition strategy that includes incentives.
• Celebrate early wins to build momentum and excitement around the program.

It is absolutely essential for leadership to communicate purpose, value, urgency, and the critical need for employees to support the RIM Program. The message “This change matters and is needed now” must be clear, and repeated until the project is brought to fruition and beyond.

By managing the change, you can avoid an alienated, non-supportive staff, working through a failing program that misses the mark on expected results. Introduce organizational change management practices; engage your team and instantiate a sustainable RIM program into your organization.

There is a new credential developed by AIIM, Certified Information Professional (CIP), which may be the right fit for your career and organizational needs demonstrating a broad range of technical and business competencies including:
• Access and Use
• Capture and Manage
• Collaborate and Deliver
• Security and Preservation
• Architecture and Systems
• Plan and Implement

OK, you’ve read this far and are probably wondering If you have time to individually study for the exam, consume “ the elephant” of content at a boot camp or maybe, you just need a refresher in some areas…but which ones? Consider this solution. A professional look, feel, sound (and speed) of an eLearning course prepares you for the CIP exam. You can self-assess your strengths and identify areas for focused attention, learn at your own pace through 6 modules and use a practice exam to assess your progress.
Strait and Associates LLC announces a new eLearning course “Information Management Practices, Tools and Strategies” in Preparation for AIIM’s Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam. 7-8 estimated hours.

For more information about the course, go to http://www.straitassoc.com.
For information about the Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam developed by AIIM, the Global Community of Information Professionals, go to www.aiim.org

San Francisco, CA – March 21, 2012 – AIIM, the global community of information professionals, today announced the first training partner for AIIM’s Certified Information Professional (CIP) program.

“This represents a critical milestone in our ability to develop and deliver workshops focused on CIP exam preparation,” said John Mancini, AIIM president.  “As the first approved member of our Training Partner Program, Strait & Associates will continue to work with AIIM to define training solutions that enable information professional success.”

“Our deep knowledge and experience in the records and information management field allows us to rapidly diagnose core strategic, policy, technology, and business process issues that lie at the heart of our client’s business challenges,” said Strait & Associates president Cheryl Strait. “We feel that the CIP will give organizations the means to understand the full spectrum of issues involved in making smart information management decisions.”

AIIM’s CIP has been adopted by information professionals in over 12 countries and is gaining recognition from industry experts and analysts as the designation capable of demonstrating the mastery of knowledge needed by the new roles of information professionals.

Click here to download this press release as a PDF.

Bloomfield Hills, MI (PRWEB) March 17, 2012 — Strait & Associates, a management consulting company specializing in records and information, is pleased to announce they have become the first approved AIIM® Education Partner in support of preparing candidates for the Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam.

Strait & Associates has developed an AIIM-approved web-based training program intended to be a refresher for intermediate and experienced information professionals preparing to sit for the CIP certification exam. “AIIM recognizes even the most seasoned information professional may not have had the opportunity to master or directly experience every discipline tested within the CIP exam” says John Mancini, president of AIIM. “By establishing this Education Partner program and working with organizations such as Strait & Associates, we can ensure courses are available to address all domain areas covered by the CIP exam.”

“By taking the STRAIT Information Management Processes, Tools and Strategies training, you identify areas which may require some additional study and refresh yourself on topics you may not have dealt with in a while.

Additionally, our interactive eLearning includes a 100-question Practice Exam which you can use to pre or post assess your readiness to take the exam.” says Cheryl Strait, President of Strait & Associates LLC.

Go to http://www.straitassoc.com/CIPtraining to learn more or register for the training today! For more information on the CIP Certification visit http://www.aiim.org/certification

Click here to download this press release as a PDF.

When trying to wrap my head around these numbers, I found it helpful to associate the numbers with tangible items I could relate to. So, after conducting some research on the subject of gigabytes, terabytes and petabytes, here is what I learned:

• One gigabyte is 4,473 200-page books
• One terabyte equals:
  o Roughly 1,000 gigabytes.
  o 50,000 trees made into paper and printed
  o 200 mile high stack of paper, which you can compare to the international space station orbiting 250 miles above the earth!
• Ten terabytes equals the entire printed collection at the U.S. Library of Congress
• Fifty terabytes is the typical content of a large mass storage system
• One petabyte is a million gigabytes
• Two petabytes is estimated to be the information within all US academic research libraries
• Two hundred petabytes is the equivalent of all printed material…….. on the globe!

After visualizing a gigabyte, terabyte and petabyte makes the fact that many organizations are nearing or exceeding the petabyte mark more daunting.

If we think about the impact of these quantities, the numbers represent how much data and information CIO’s and Records Managers are expected to manage. We entrust our IT and records management departments to keep our information in order, while also enabling us to decrease the time it takes to find and retrieve information. Add to this our expectation that they will ensure our organizations maintain compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.

I can’t help but wonder if the original developers of computers ever envisioned us managing these enormous volumes of data. We can thank evolving technology for enabling us to become so proliferate! How much information is your organization dealing with?

My client was candid enough to share his challenge: “We think big data is impacting our business but we need help sorting it out”. To someone who actually enjoyed their statistics classes, it was music to my ears and a timely inquiry.

While a common definition remains elusive, there is agreement that big data encompasses larger data sets along with the agile opportunity to find insight in new and emerging types of data. Data can then be used. Today it is possible to answer questions that you could not answer previously and perhaps in real time. Analysis techniques can unlock significant value by making information available and usable at greater frequency. Who wouldn’t want to improve operational efficiencies or add revenue to their existing business models, not to mention identifying new business models never before thought possible?

So, I closed my Excel app and opened up my data analysis tool of choice, Minitab. A few hours (and as many theories later), it was clear. Triple digit increases in a variable key to my client’s core process were realized over the last 3 years. They could feel it, but couldn’t quantify it, until now!

I knew there was a reason I enjoyed those statistics classes.

There are various methods used to create process maps. One commonly used is the Swimlane Model which depicts workflow. The model looks like a swimming pool with horizontal bands that stretch across the page. Each band (Swimlane) represents a role or department that is responsible for doing a particular business task. The model may include:

• Activities: steps of the process
• Inputs: consumables used to produce something
• Controls: rules, guidelines, policy, law
• Tools: applications, systems
• Outputs: deliverables that will be used within the process or by an external customer
• Lines: connectors of one activity to another

A Process Model allows key players to have a common understanding and language of how work gets completed. The modeling effort usually includes various departments within an organization. One player frequently missing from the table is the Records Manager. This is an oversight. There are many valuable things that the records manager can bring to the process discussion. Some essentials their expertise can bring include:

• Outputs including specific records and information produced during the process
• Capture locations which identify where physical and electronic records are created
• Capture locations which identify where records and information reside or are to be stored
• Identify the roles involved in the record lifecycle such as who creates and uses the record
• Identify the disposition of the record

Build Records and Information Management (RIM) into your business process. Start by asking to be part of the process discussion. Then, consider process models as a tool used to help you communicate and implement your RIM program. To build a sustainable Records Management program, it is necessary to tie your company’s policy to business activities.

1)      Get informed: Identify the current and future capabilities within your organization

2)      Get ready: Understand common risks to the business from mobile devices

3)      Act Now: Develop an actionable plan

Most organizations are integrating mobile devices into their environment but too few have policies in place to protect the device content for compliance and security. Even fewer have enforcement measures to support these policies. Considering the realistic threat that a large percentage of sensitive and proprietary information is contained or accessed on mobile devices, the call to action falls on both Information Management and C-level executives to ensure the productivity gains provided by mobile devices are continued while maintaining protection and compliance of the assets and information critical to their business.

While many companies may be considering how to address Social Media Guidelines for Blogs and Social Networks (e.g., LinkedIn and Twitter), the reality remains that we can’t control how our employees utilize social networking. So, how do we manage what an employee publishes about our company? The current leading practice is to provide guidance on how they are to represent the Company when they do use social networking sites, especially when it is in a business context and the Company’s name or inference is being used.

Guiding principles are used to communicate to employees the expectations of using social media for business purposes.  Here are a few guiding principles to consider if you are writing social media guidelines:

• Clearly state who you are and disclose your working relationship
• Understand the context of a message before engaging in dialog about the message
• Be conversational while remaining professional. Remember to always be a representative of the Company and that everything stated will be used in the court of public opinion
• Respond to the content of the message, not the person
• Stick to the facts and cite sources. Opinions are to be avoided unless absolutely necessary and relevant to the dialog
• When responding to a problem, follow-through to ensure resolution of the problem
• Do not mention other employees by name unless specifically authorized or requested to do so by an employee empowered to grant the authorization or request

New software functionality is often a moving target as agile teams converge on the best way to meet the swirling vortex of customer needs. And don’t even bring up directional changes based on “ah ha” moments in the last sprint! My clients really like their agile implementations and no one can deny the contributions made by agile approaches. But how do supporting disciplines get with the program? For that matter, what does the program look like? And about those user stories…

Agile process or not, individual people still perform tasks, even if it’s a highly iterative process and solutions literally unfold in real time. An organized workplace is an important enabler to the efficiency and effectiveness of everyone involved in the process. The physical configuration of agile teams supports their interactions by having functions sitting in close proximity to one another. Visual aids help teams see their work progress through the agile process. A teams’ virtual configuration is equally important. Records and information management aids such as a file plan showing location of key data and metadata conventions that support storage, retrieval and ongoing management of information, aid in team efficiency and help new team members be productive.

But it’s hard to engage in a process you can’t see. Process and information documentation (architecture if you will) that makes the work products and the work flow visible is the place to start. Once you can follow the process end to end, you can step through the process and identify where it makes sense to engage your discipline. And once you know how and where information is stored, accessed and managed you have a head start on integrating your activities into the development process. In an environment where the primary measure of progress is working software, consider defining the primary measure or progress for your discipline.

Sound information management practices and a small investment in visually representing your software development workflow can pay big dividends in helping everyone get down the yellow brick road. Just click your heels and you may find it’s not as difficult as it may seem.

For more information please visit Strait & Associates website for the whitepaper Agile Software Development and Quality Management: Finding the Fit