Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company.
Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious to hear about information management challenges like email management, retention management, or asset data management, this podcast is for you. This is Lee, and in this episode, Mora and I will talk more about records in the common era.
That was my entrance, Maura. So it's kind of a take it away.
We did forget a couple of things, though. The printing press, typewriters, and digital. Well, we did cover digital records, but the printing press and typewriters we didn't cover in our last episode. So if you want to jump to there and then go to today's today, that would be great.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Well, so the printing press, typewriters, copiers, and digital records are really kind of a path unto themselves, and they're all about making information more available.
Right.
So when we started, you were talking about illuminated manuscripts when we last, when we last spoke and how long it took and how few people were able to write and had the materials to write or were able to read, how expensive those illuminated manuscripts were. So information was really limited to a small group of people in terms of written information that could be checked. And that didn't change over time because the writing existed.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: And who could read.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: And who could read? I said that. Oh, sorry, you were talking to the dog.
So while.
So, so a lot, the vast majority of people were depending on someone else to tell them the truth, someone else to tell them what the news was or what the rules were, and they were vulnerable to people lying to them.
So with the printing press, it was much easier to recreate a copy of the same thing. No little quirks or errors introduced by different copiers, copyists, different scribes, writing down supposedly the same thing, but making small changes. The printing press was the same exact thing over and over.
Typewriters brought that, but it was still a limited group of people. Not everybody had a printing press.
More people learned to read, but it was still not widespread, but at least you had the same information being reproduced and handed out.
Typewriters brought that skill to a lot more people, that ability to a lot more people.
Typewriters were relatively easy to use. They were available to many more people, and more and more people were able to read. And so the reproducing of information, the distribution of information became more fair, more Equitable, more common.
And then you get into copiers, mimeograph machines, or the copiers that were invented by the Xerox company and Kodak, the sort of photographic copies.
And again, it became so easy to reproduce and distribute the same information.
When you get to electronic information, we went to a whole new order, new order of magnitude of how quick and easy it was to distribute information everywhere.
And unfortunately, at that point we've reintroduced one of the vulnerabilities that we had way back in the beginning of people being able to lie easily.
So way back in the beginning when you had very few people who could read and write and information being distributed only to a select few because it was so expensive to scribe something manually by hand and then hand it out one copy at a time.
Now it's easy. Anybody can create information and distribute it instantly across the world.
And people can lie, and they do.
But you see it in print and you see it on your screen and you've done a search and you think the search is a source of authority, a source of truth.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Who doesn't trust the Internet?
[00:04:37] Speaker B: Right?
Right. And you should, you should trust it. There's a lot of good information out there.
But the question is, how do you tell the difference between the good information and the lies or errors? It could be errors. It doesn't even have to be a lie. But you know, there have been famous examples in the past of newspaper headlines that were wrong. They were printed too soon. What a Dewey one. Wasn't that the presidential election? I don't know, I wasn't here for that. But there was a famous headline where looked like somebody was going to win the presidential election and then he didn't. But there was a newspaper that was printed with it.
You today you have podcast and they're sort of asynchronous. They're not real time news for the most part, like our podcast, we're recording at a certain point in time. This podcast won't be distributed for another six weeks or so.
So we know what we know today.
And if we were a news, a news podcast, as opposed to an information governance podcast, we might be talking about something based on what we know today.
But it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be. Still, it could, it could potentially not be true in six weeks when it comes out, or even in two days when it comes out this week, as news has changed pretty rapidly.
I've been hearing podcasts that change minute to minute and you're, and the, the authors will come on and say, well, we recorded this One yesterday morning. And that was before things changed yesterday afternoon. But we're going to put it out anyway, so just remember that we didn't know that thing that happened yesterday afternoon.
So my point is 200 or not 200, 1200 years ago, information was scarce. It was hard to find it. And people without access had a didn't, were left vulnerable to whoever was going to tell them things. Today, we have pretty much the exact opposite problem. Information is ubiquitous, and yet it's like finding a needle in a haystack, as the old saying goes, to know the truth.
So what does that mean for us as information governance professionals? And when we talk to our clients, it's actually a problem that we see repeated over and over again. If you think about in all the, all the clients that we've dealt with, Lee, there's always old data somewhere. You know, they had an old version, they used to use file shares, and they had an old business organization and everybody just made up their own folders and they've left stuff out there. And then as people change jobs or a new group came in or they restructured, they're like, oh, my God, I can't find anything in the file shares. Oh, hey, we're using SharePoint now. Great. I'm going to start a whole new set of files in the SharePoint location.
And we had one client who the CEO was like, I can't ever find anything twice in SharePoint. I have to ask people to send me a link because otherwise I can't ever find it again.
I'm sure that I have 25 copies of every document that I've ever been sent out there somewhere in SharePoint. And he was not wrong when we did the migration of that SharePoint site, those SharePoint sites, from that SharePoint instance to a new one, because they were switching over to a new one.
So many duplicates. And we see that over and over again at all of our clients that they couldn't handle the old organization anymore because people change their minds about how they want to organize things. We know that from, I know that from library school, from learning how to catalog. And there's so many detailed rules in the cataloging world.
The official rules of how you catalog records for a library, books for a library. And yet what we learned was two catalogers sitting next to each other in the same organization might catalog something differently because there's 17 levels of. There's not 17, but there's nine levels of information that you have to account for. And by the time you get to 8 and 9. It's a lot of judgment calls.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: How many information governance professionals does it take to file a record?
[00:08:58] Speaker B: Well, how many does it take to find one? Yeah, I'd be more the same.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: Yeah, just use our online courses, for example.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: We're trying to keep things straight and just between three people, we managed to, you know, the first, first attempt, we managed to really not define it correctly.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Well, yeah, so you're telling, you're telling tales out of school, but I think it's a good example because when we started building the collection of courses for the new academy, we were really thinking about content like, okay, we have a set of courses that are about contract management, a set that are about records retentions, a set that are about asset data set. Eventually that will be about, you know, other information governance policies or training or something.
And so we were grouping them like that.
But what, what we've now switched to is thinking about our process, which, it's one of those cobblers, the cobbler's children things, because that is what we tell our clients. Follow your process, and that is how we organize all of our other records. But this thing, it was new and we, and we thought about it a different way. But the process of how do we create the training, how do we create the consulting light pieces, the interactive pieces that go along with it, how do we record the audio, how do we put it all together and do the editing and then how do we publish it?
Those, those are big steps.
And you don't do them once. You do every one of them two or three times for the same class that ends up out on the Internet. We have multiple iterations at each phase of the process.
So now our organization of those files reflects the process.
And I think it's better.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: It was funny, though.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: It was funny.
So just so you know, everybody, we take our own advice. But we're also sometimes hard to deal with. Just like other clients.
We have to, we have to learn it too. But it was a good, it was a good exercise, just learning that. We've learned a lot of things doing that. But one of them was, okay, how do we apply our principles of information governance to this new thing we're doing?
Right?
And I think that's the key to this deluge of information that we're dealing with in our daily lives is, okay, what are the principles that you're looking for? So think back and, you know, dating myself, when you're in a checkout line as a kid and you're looking at headlines next to you on newspapers, you have Your, you know, your.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: I looked at the candy instead of the newspapers.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: But okay, you really. Candy? Well, I wasn't allowed to have candy usually, so I was reading the newspaper headlines. So you had, and I grew up outside of Washington, D.C. so you had the Washington Post, you had the local Courier Gazette for our small town. And then you had the National Enquirer.
And you read the headlines on the three. And one is Congress said such and such. And the local one is new school opened or There's a harvest festival coming up soon. And then you have the National Enquirer.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: And it's almost always person abducted by aliens.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: It was, you see, and you grew up out in Illinois, but they had the aliens there too.
So even as a kid, I'm looking at those three headlines and I can tell very clearly which ones are probably true and which ones aren't. And it's the same thing now when you're looking at all the clickbait that comes through all the headlines that come through from national news sources, from independent news sources, from people, just people.
And there's not, you know, in those newspaper racks, you had a physical reminder too, because the big newspaper was square and folded in half and big print and the local newspaper was a lot smaller. And then the National Enquirer was a different shape.
You look on the Internet and everything looks the same.
The platforms are the same. They don't distinguish between the validity of a source. Okay, so what are you going to do?
Think back to what records are for.
Records are about providing evidence and documentation of what happened.
And so if you're looking at a headline that says the hospital said X, is the headline coming from the hospital?
Is the hospital quoted? Or is it, does the headline sound reasonable or does it sound kind of outrageous? And then when you look at where did this go? Where did the story come from? Who you know, what's the source of this? Is it a newspaper that you respect? Is it local? Is it a news channel? Is it the hospital? Is the hospital even included in the discussion? Or is it some guy who's sitting in, you know, who's, who's just out there and he cranks out a lot of headlines and you're thinking, how is he an expert on the hospital in town and also the farm that's in the next state over and also the water treatment plant that covers the tri state area or whatever.
You have to do some work to see what's this headline, what's the story behind it, who's quoted, who's involved, what's the Source.
And you start to.
And it doesn't happen all at once. One story doesn't tell you everything you need to know. You might need to go look for another story.
I've taken to. When I see really outrageous headlines, the first thing I do is kind of mentally edit out any adjectives or adverbs and just try to think of, okay, what's the subject and the noun, the subject and the verb that we're talking about here?
This head happened, as opposed to this crazy and outrageous and incredible, most amazing thing happened. And it was, you know, spectacular and quick and whatever. And all those extra words are designed to get you to pay attention, but they. They sort of obfuscate what actually is the story.
And you. The more you practice this, the more you go in looking for it, and you'll see that.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: So the problem is search engine optimization, because all those words are what these tricks of the trade tell you to put in.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Yeah, our platforms are not helping us right now. That is true. You really have to dig in. But I'm again thinking back to.
Illuminated manuscripts were really pretty, but they were sometimes wrong. There were errors in them.
The printing press made things look official, but they weren't always right. They more often were because that was a pretty focused, narrow set of people. But then think about once you had a mimeograph machine. Those were relatively cheap or carbon paper. So somebody could type something. They could make 10 copies. They could put them out everywhere. They could hang a bunch of posters up.
And you don't have any source there. You just have the thing itself. And it's everywhere. So you think it's true.
So the principles here of, okay, our record keeping is supposed to tell us what happened.
It's not just news. It's what happened to this organization. This organization is keeping records. And we have a lot of organizations that put out statistics, they put out factual information.
I think. I think a lot. And I have in the past always looked at federal sources for data. There's been a lot of discussion in the news lately about databases being taken down and websites being changed.
But there is still good data, but you have to find it, maybe triangulate the federal sources with major professional organizations.
So you have American Academy of Pediatrics, you have the American Bar Association. You have big.
You have the labor unions for auto workers. You have the car manufacturers, the big institutions that are responsible for creating the data as part of their job.
They are also interested in getting that data to you.
And the more places you can find a story that matches up, the more likely it is that it's true. So I guess that's what I'm trying to apply these information governance principles to the sources of information that are coming at us all the time and looking at this history of information in society because companies are part of society.
Companies, infrastructure organizations, public organizations like utilities or hospitals or, or other service organizations, they are.
People are not going to. People are not creating fake information to do their jobs because then it's harder to do your job so that the real data is there.
Because as you do your job, you're creating and using information. You know that all of you in your own jobs, it's true for the people in these big institutions as well.
They have to have the real information. Or, you know, think about a building. If you don't have good information about the girders and the concrete, the building falls down.
That's a problem.
That's a real world problem, that your fake information is not going to change.
So it's a little bit hard right now to dig through everything, but the data is there and we can find it.
And we, as all of us as business owners trying to manage our own information.
If we keep those principles in mind, then we can think about what other groups are doing. They're doing the same thing. They need good information to do their jobs. So that's where I want to stop.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Excellent. If you have any questions, please send us an email at info trailblazer us.com or look us up in the web at www.trailblazer.us.com or our Online Learning Academy at www.trailblazer. learningAcademy.
Thank you for listening and please tune into our next episode.
Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake, who created our music.
[00:20:15] Speaker B: Thanks everyone.
