Will RIM Become Obsolte? a question from ARMAite Mark Mandel at Fri, 07/23/2010

Posted on Jul 25, 2010 in Records Management News

Records and Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment (RIM), ERM, EDMS, ERMS, AIIM, ARMA … so many acronyms so much to do.

OK, so the ques­tion is, “Will the RIM Pro­fes­sion Become Obsolete?”.

Quick answer … NO!

Why because it sim­ply will morph just as it has over the centuries.

I once wrote an arti­cle about “The Tablet-less Palace”. It was a story about Abdul and his doc­u­ment repos­i­tory for the Pharaoh’s busi­ness records. Mostly trade car­a­vans with things from the east. He was metic­u­lous in his record keep­ing. He kept the clay tablets in alpha­bet­i­cal order by Camel Name.

One of assis­tants came in and said, “Abdul no longer will we need tablets” We have dis­cov­ered Papyrus, it can be rolled and stored more eas­ily and aren’t quite so heavy.

Abdul,said, “Not in my Tablet Room, I will never have such a thing”. Tablets are sturdy and will last forever.

And so as Abdul passed away and the future turned to parch­ment, paper, papyrus and other forms of scrolls. Later good ole Guten­berg was the big prob­lem … now the stuff came off the presses like never before.

Some­time back I think it was 1972 or so an arti­cle pre­dicted that we would be Paper­less soon.

It is nearly 2011 and there are 2 bil­lion boxes in stor­age and grow­ing at 10–13% a year. Yeah dig­i­tal is alive and the “Cloud” will be good if any­one can fig­ure out how to make it secure.

But then what’s next … sand, stone, papyrus, paper, print­ing press, dig­i­tal .. what’s next, eh … I sug­gest Holo­graphic Vapor.

So my answer is NO it will sim­ply MORPH and the keep­ers of it will moan and make noises through the change.

My opin­ion!

Cary McGov­ern
FileMan

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