User Collaboration in Records ManagementFrom Personal Computers to Web 2.0

ARMA Austin 2009

Patricia Galloway, PhD, CDPSchool of InformationUniversity of Texas at Austin

Overview Office computing history Importance of the desktop model for user

practice in the workplace Web 2.0 in the workplace, implications for

recordkeeping RM responses to Web 2.0 Principles of RM 2.0--plus one

Office organization and the advent of personal computing Green-screen, centralized systems: 1960s-

70s Standalone personal computers (typewriter

substitutes, paper output): 1980s Networked personal computers (advent of

network-centric management): 1980s-90s Internet-connected personal computer

networks (open to the world): 1990s-2000s

Access to personal computers by ordinary consumers 1980s: mostly at work, rarely at home 1990s: home computers become more

common (1 per home); Internet via dialup 2000s: home computers become the norm

(now in multiples); Internet via broadband and (increasingly) wireless

The venerable desktop metaphor

Aimed at knowledge workers from the start Alto Star Lisa

Underlying research distinguished pilers and filers, importance of reminding to later finding

Interface design aimed at accommodating both

Features of the desktop

Recursive: virtual desktop on real desktop in real office

Direct manipulation of items on desktop Spatial meaning

Grouping Distances

Option to open object fished from piles of objects Option for one-to-many relations Logically “fuzzy” and temporary “classification”

Lessons of the desktop metaphor Allow piles: screen space limits number

(virtual desktops multiply number) Allow deferred classification to enable the

desktop’s affordances for knowledge creation

Remind (by visual representation of documents) to enable finding and prioritization

Lessons from sensemaking

Users create their own piles and messes as one mode of arriving at meaning

Users create their own folders = categories Folder hierarchies invent ontologies

Lessons from PIM Importance of external reminders to

support memory People remember by people and time Individual concern with recordkeeping

varies with time Age of the person Age of the record

Lessons from evolutionary biology

Emergence “Order for free”: the whole is greater than

its parts Self-organization as result of interaction of

phenomena at different levels

Lessons from information retrieval

Stepping back from the single file to look at larger patterns

Text mining as a tool for functional analysis

Systematic derivation of structure from records corpora

Lessons from knowledge management

Value of information assets may outweigh potential cost of risks

Accountability (therefore compliance) requires context (“underbrush” is context)

In-house use of digital discovery tools to mine enterprise records corpus can reveal both risk and treasure (see marketing of DD tools)

Communities of practice need own classification and retention

Classification 2.0? Sensemaking and emergence Importance of memory prompts to individual

creativity Data mining reveals patterns in corpora Visual classification via direct manipulation “Long tail” significance of “worthless” files Tagging vs classification Self-organization as temporal process Internal classification defines communities of practice

How can it work? Finding value in fuzzy categorization

Work-relevant “hold” categories from locations “not presently classifiable” (still on desktop) “belongs to multiple projects” (shortcuts in multiple

files) Classification through relationships between files Periodic snapshots of desktops: multiple temporal

states Periodic harvesting of folder names from directory

trees

Some conclusions Desktop environment abets deferred

classification “Fuzzy” classifications exist on the desktop

File naming systems Locations and relations

Value exists in classifications emergent from knowledge work

Now: Beyond the desktop Remember: beginning in the late 1980s,

internal networking Remember: beginning in the early 1990s,

Internet emerges to link everything And the desktop opens up to the cloud…

Lessons from design and usability

Direct manipulation and the reality of metaphor Desktop innovations…

Lifestreams Rooms Bumptop Microsoft Vista desktop Macintosh Leopard desktop

Lead to integrating web services and cloud computing with the existing desktop

Lessons from “web science” Power law effects: the long tail Wisdom of crowds: crowdsourcing Ambient findability: search and ubiquity Web 2.0: based significantly on large-scale

effects Keep it all--then filter

New features for Desktop 2.0

Vista adds metadata tagging for files to aid desktop search

Snow Leopard adds Finder Cover Flow, Time Machine system-state snapshots, Spaces virtual desktops

Externalities: reaching into the cloud for web services and integrating on the desktop WWW as route to applications (Doodle,

Surveymonkey, Googledocs) Email in multiples (Windows Live Mail)

Who is using it? “Millennials”: born 1987-1997, grown up

with a mouse in their hands--and soon to dominate the workforce

Most are computer-comfortable, many activities computer-supported

Make use of all kinds of digital devices, most portable and web-enabled

Personal use of the cloud Bill paying, tax preparation Advice on everything (Google) Keeping found things found (RSS; delicious, digg,

reddit) Photo (Flickr) and video (YouTube) sharing Social networking: Myspace, Facebook … and

Ravelry Podcast television, MP/3 downloads, film

downloads Blogging/microblogging And email: for file management

Aside on distributed identity Turkle, Life on the Screen Hayles, How we became Posthuman Pervasive computing +virtual

environments = posthuman distributed identity

Multiple personalities Rewired brains

Actual observations in 10 years Sequential, not parallel use of applications

(LiveJournal->Myspace->Facebook) Application sets considered “cool” Fads that die (Twitter?) or are commodified

(LinkedIn etc.) hence no longer cool Applications are abandoned, data forgotten,

when data are no longer important Importance of no-cost, platform-neutral

The urge to consolidate identity Graduate students: “I’m doing everything I

have to do online” Tendency to integrate life and work tasks,

not separate them Time and space constraints Burden of agency: professors, employers

take student/employee wiredness, 24/7 availability for granted

New workers bring changes in the workplace As students, millennials became accustomed to

cloud services: “free” and available everywhere Learned how to do their own system integration Became accustomed to computing at home and at

work, without drawing a line between the two As employees under the same pressure, they expect

no less (and now it is much easier to use preferred technologies), in a wireless environment and from multiple platforms (cell phone, laptop, iPod, GPS…)

Web 2.0 economy (why change won’t stop) Advantages depend on numbers and non-gated

usage Business model: users give away information in

return for value Huge numbers allow harvesting of information on

behavior, which leads to better data structuring Better data structuring = better value Better value = more users

Relevance of technological convergence Two April Fool stories, 2009:

Guardian newspaper shifting to tweets Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley/Blackwell merger

All digital all the time Work: knowledge/information economy Play: music, TV, film, gaming Life tasks: Google as universal advisor

Medium and message both digital (Weinberger) Linked to media convergence: single vendor for

phone, Internet, television

Web 2.0 threat: ungovernable recordkeeping (without borders) Blackberry addiction in the White House Use of familiar tools to get the job done

Online collaboration: Googledocs, wikis Scheduling: Doodle polls Desktop applications as web services Increased interoperability

Devotion to the subversive desktop metaphor Avoidance of restrictions on technology (Cory

Doctorow, Little Brother)

Web 2.0, cloud computing as attractants at work Employee reluctance to learn ways of

working judged retrograde Universal tool: the browser Access to everything they know

Illusion of keeping everything in one place Example: network of multiple email accounts

Ability to communicate the same message to a specific community sumultaneously

Examples: Centrality of Google Experiment tested lay people using Medline Plus

to search for medical information; preferred to search generally using Google

CACM article April 2009 points to superior Google Scholar citation accuracy for computer science compared to ISI Web of Science

Google Books project is providing stupendously huge body of text to develop ever better natural-language processing

Response of RM? If desktop activity represents value,

declaring everything transitory won’t work If Web 2.0 is constantly spawning useful

tools, ideas, information, making people give it up is at best shortsighted

Do you personally want to part with Web 2.0 applications? Do you really?

RM solution I: Gulag Locally-managed “cloud chamber” behind the

firewall: the example of Sharepoint Prime case of vendor lock-in (some opening via

Microsoft desktop XML) Design basis is one-on-one sharing of

conventional desktop products Collaboration, dynamic sharing, mashups limited Access limited, structured, managed Nothing personal by definition

RM solution II: Open-n-shut Multiple private clouds outside the firewall Outsourced multiple vendors

Best of breed applications can be selected Google can give service free and still sell monitoring

and security Users can integrate private/work records Problems

Security, confidentiality No easy way to integrate applications No easy way to tease out work records

RM solution III: User-manager Users’ choice of applications

Employee use judges value of applications Mixture of desktop and cloud

Record capture at the desk (and from the desk) Mindful employee action in managing records Employees retain what is valuable to them as long as it is

valuable Value judged by individuals and workgroups

Record classification via tagging/folksonomies Problems

Even harder to tease out work records: but is it necessary?

10 Principles of RM 2.0 (Bailey) Scalability Comprehensive

(whole life cycle) Hardware, software,

location independent Extensible Applicable to all

information

Proportionate and flexible

User investment Marketable to all

stakeholders Self-critical,

embracing change Acceptable to RIM

community

One more: Steering, not rowing Make “user investment” into “user construction” Standard assumption: users are bad recordkeepers Reality: users keep records as well as necessary to

do their jobs (and live their lives) Users classify, prioritize, schedule User behavior and use tell more about records than

management by a relative outsider In a knowledge economy, user information

behavior is valuable: learn how to harvest and mine it

Summary Importance of the desktop model for user

creativity: exposes user relation to and knowledge of records, shows records in action

Web 2.0 in the workplace is here to stay: opens up even more issues of user behavior as guide to meaning, exposes information flows

RM 1.0 will not scale in this environment: RM 2.0 must involve user participation, RM use of digital tools for analysis of content and structure

Questions?

galloway@ischool.utexas.edu