Rim News & Articles

Will we look back at 2010 as the year of mobile content management and collaboration? At least two market researchers think so. And to prove it, a number of companies are already in the game with tools that put enterprise collaboration platforms into information workers' pockets.

Business and government use of the World Wide Web is expanding exponentially, said Dr. Timothy P. O’Keefe, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Information Systems and Chair, University of North Dakota to the audience at the ARMA International Conference. He emphasized the need for leadership and collaboration between records management professionals and IT professionals.

Some see Web 2.0 as the solution to all information management problems. Some have suggested Web 2.0 will result in the death of records management as a discipline. O’Keefe stated the Web 2.0 explosion could lead to the change in title from records managers to content managers as a “record” is identifiable by what’s in it rather than the format of it.

Introducing this session was ARMA International’s Executive Director, Marilyn Bier. She opened the conversation by saying that over the past few years, Records and Information Management (RIM) has emerged from the shadows as more and more organizations begin to realize just how important it is to their governance, risk management, and compliance efforts. In that spirit, it falls to the individual professionals to rise to that occasion and to help our organizations evolve from within.

Enter Doug Allen, CRM, ARMA International’s 2009-10 President. To be honest, Allen didn’t enter right away. Instead, his session began with a video, highlighting ARMA International’s tradition of excellence in RIM education. And apparently, that history goes back to 1955 -- with videos presented from the very earliest days, touting the paperless office of the future, and a cute animated sheet of paper called “Scrappy” who served as one of the original mascots of the association. Sound and black and white video changes pace and we enter the modern world of information management, showcasing the association’s active Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook and iConference sites (among other educational efforts). The underlying message: this is not your father’s ARMA International.

Handango, a provider of smartphone applications for various mobile platforms, has recently released its First Half 2008 Handango Yardstick, a trend report about smartphone content and applications. Games and entertainment applications are the big winners so far this year, as people turn from productivity to time wasting. The games category leaped from fourth place at year-end 2007 into the second spot behind the entertainment category — for the first time in Yardstick’s history.