December 8, 2017
Dear Everyone:
We actually had an ARMA meeting this month.
Usually, we skip the month of December because people are already
too busy with
Holiday Stuff.
But our new Chapter President, “Veronica”, decided we could go ahead and
have a meeting, especially since it was being hosted by “Popsicle”, the
robotics and software company that I met with last month, and because it
was early in the month.
So last Wednesday, nearly a dozen people showed up for
sushi,
teriyaki
chicken, rice, and a chance to vent about Records and Information
Management (RIM). “Nikki”,
the Product Manager (a title that could mean anything, including “Sales
Rep”) at “Popsicle”, started it out with an open-ended question like:
“What is your greatest challenge as a Records Manager?”
Well, that was easy: Upper
Management.
Why? “Records Management
doesn’t make us any money.”
True. There is no place that
you can point to on a General Ledger that shows the company pulling in
money because of RIM.
On the other hand, you CAN point to Pacific Gas and Electric Company
(PG&E), a local energy utility that
blew up part of San Bruno,
California, because of the company’s lax attitude towards RIM.
Sure, they had bought a patchwork of smaller utilities for their
pipelines, then didn’t know where those pipelines were because they
didn’t care about the records.
But they found one of them when it blew up just across the street
from
San Francisco International Airport.
Oops.
PG&E happily threw RIM under the bus and fervently promised to do better
in the future. Then they
hired a bunch of Information Technology (IT) guys, tacked “Electronic
Information Management” into their titles and told them to join ARMA.
That was about a year ago.
Today, all those memberships are coming up for renewal and the IT
guys are all saying, “What’s ‘ARMA’?”
The other Big Point about Upper Management is that no one in a company
will pay any attention to the Records Managers unless ordered to do so
by the people at the top. If
the CEO says, “Thou shalt have a RIM program and follow it”, there is at
least a chance that folks will listen.
Until that CEO takes his
Golden Parachute and leaves for greener
pastures elsewhere.
So, we all had a great time discussing RIM and how much better life
would be if people would just take us seriously.
In fact, we got an email the other day from one of the attendees
about how she was still talking about it at work the next day, and had a
sit-down with her (unusually) receptive manager to map out a “plan” at
her company. More power to
her.
I spent the rest of this week putting up
Holiday decorations.
The outside lights are actually fairly simple.
Pull dozens of things out of the outdoor closet in order to be
able to reach the step ladder.
Ditto the container filled with brightly-colored lights.
Put nearly everything back in the closet in order the clear enough of
the patio to put up the ladder.
Climb the ladder and use good, old
duct tape to fasten the
strings of lights to the top of the patio fence.
Move ladder a few feet and repeat.
Plug it all into a big timer and hope for the best.
The indoor lights, at the kitchen window, were a tad bit more
problematical when I pulled the timer out of the big plastic bag filled
with colored lights…and it fell apart.
This required a trip to the nearby hardware store for a new
timer. Once that was done,
it was a simple matter of balancing on the (smaller, indoor) step
ladder, with one foot in the kitchen sink, to place plastic
suction-cup-holders around the inside edge of the windows, then drape
the lights artistically while waving to my next-door neighbor as she
came home from work.
Now that that’s all done, I just need to draft “Jeannie” into helping me
pick out a Christmas Tree and wrestle it into the car and out again.
The stand is ready and waiting on the patio.
I found it while looking for the lights.
Love, as always,
Pete
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