Region Coordinator Dean Koga's Holiday Message

Season’s Greetings!
By Dean Koga

It’s hard to believe that the holiday season is already upon us. It’s an exciting time to be with our friends and family, and to be thankful for everything we have. It’s a time to share with others less fortunate than ourselves and to seek out those special gifts to give to the people we love. Wherever you spend the holidays, may they be happy and safe.

As we start out the New Year, I hope you will give some thought to supporting ARMA by some means, such as volunteering, attending meetings, supporting the Educational Foundation, speaking at a meeting, or referring a new member.

Our chapter meetings are well on their way for another year, as well as the plans for our Region Conference in 2006. The conference will be held in Seattle and co-chaired by Susan Priebe and Jenny Winkler. I’m sure they would like to hear from you if you have any suggestions, would like to be a speaker or be a vendor for the conference.

Remember, December 20 is the deadline for sending speaker’s proposals for the ARMA International Conference to be held in Chicago, September 18-20, 2005.

If you have not heard, Leslie Sturgeon has accepted a new position in her hometown of Long Beach and resigned her position as Region Coordinator on November 9. We wish Leslie the best of luck in her new position and thank her for the work she did for the Great Northwest Region. Sue Lord, our Region Manager and myself will take care of any region business and hope to visit all of the chapters in the Region, but we will miss working with Leslie.

A reminder, ARMA elections are coming up in January, so remember to vote. Bonnie Nadler from the Bellevue/Eastside Chapter as well as Doug Allen, Cindy LeMay and Deb Marshall are running for Association Director while Carol Choksy, Susan McKinney and Helen Streck are candidates for the association’s President-Elect position. It is important that you vote. You saw how important one vote could be by our recent gubernatorial race in the State of Washington.

The ARMA International Educational Foundation (AIEF) is still not fully funded, so your donations are very important and are tax deductible. The Foundation funded two research projects this past year. They are “Discovery, Spoliation, and Legal Holds: Issues Affecting Your RIM Policies” by John Isaza, Esq., and “Access Rights to Business Data on Personal Computers” by John Montana, J.D.

I wish you all a happy holiday and best wishes in the coming year.

Dean Koga
Great Northwest Region Coordinator

Article on Long Beach Conference

[With permission from the author, we are reprinting an account of the ARMA International Conference held in Long Beach, California, in early October of this year. For a link to the actual article (which contains direct links to many of the companies mentioned in the article), click on "Article on Long Beach Conference," above.]

KMWorld, Content Document and Knowledge Management
Volume 13, Number 10
November/December 2004

ARMA breaks records

by Robert Smallwood of IMERGE Consulting, Inc.

ARMA International's annual conference and expo Oct. 3 to 6 in Long Beach, Calif., broke previous records, according to its organizers, becoming the largest ever records and document management trade show. Fueled by a heightened interest in boardrooms, legal and IT departments stemming from regulatory changes such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, 230-plus exhibits (and more than 90 companies new to the event) filled the show floor.

“We’ve never seen such a strong turnout from IT and legal professionals," says Dave McDermott, president of ARMA (Association for Records Managers and Administrators).

“The show exceeded our expectations,” says ARMA board member John Phillips, president of Information Technology Decisions (http://infotechdecisions.com). “It’s the result of our focus on organizational mission and member needs. Strategically, we’ve kept our attention on the U.S. and Canada, while carefully growing our global presence.”

A few key trends continued as software and services firms seek to offer full document life cycle management. Paper file and box tracking vendors added new radio frequency identification (RFID) capabilities that allow remote tracking of physical files within an organization, and also expanded their offerings to include electronic records management capabilities. Records and information management (RIM) vendors continued the trend of adding traditional electronic document management (EDM) capabilities.

Major EDM software suppliers have scrambled to acquire or align themselves with RIM vendors to integrate crucial records management capabilities and to become compliant with U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2 standard for records management systems.
E-mail management continued to be a hot topic as corporations and executives have been exposed to serious penalties due to e-mail content--often the “smoking gun” not contained in most formal records. E-mail management topics were some of the best-attended sessions at this year's ARMA conference.

Adam Wilkins, VP of Canadian-based e-mail management provider Yaletown Technology Group, a FileNet partner, pointed out that “ARMA's conference seemed to carry a more compelling message than ever before. Compliance and litigation will continue to accelerate business needs over the coming years. In the interim, e-mail and other high-volume sources of documents will force companies to change the way they allow users to create and manage electronic documents, both records and non-records.”

Strides have also been made in searching and locating records. "A new breed of search engines that provide an open, Web services architecture are emerging that can perform full-text and keyword searches across multiple content sources. This is a powerful way to integrate across these content silos," says Eric Perry, VP of product management at Scientific Software.

What the industry will likely see is the unrelenting consolidation of solution providers until they have the ability to track all written communications including e-mail, records and documents--whether paper or electronic--from creation to distribution to archiving and ultimately, to a shelf in a records storage warehouse, all of which bodes well for ARMA International’s future.

Robert Smallwood is a partner with IMERGE Consulting (imergeconsult.com), e-mail robert.smallwood@imergeconsult.com.

KMWorld, Content Document and Knowledge Management Volume 13, Number 10 November/December 2004
KMWorld is a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc.

Jobs from Great Northwest Region Posted

GREAT NORTHWEST REGION CHAPTERS COLLABORATE ON EMPLOYMENT NOTICES

The Great Northwest Region of ARMA includes Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The chapters in our region have agreed to collaborate on and share information about job openings, job applicants, and other employment information by posting to a single location, the ARMA Great Northwest Region Jobs Blog.

Each chapter will have a designated jobs information coordinator who will have the ability to post notices to the Jobs Blog at any time, without going through a Web master or anyone else. All chapters will encourage their members and area companies to let them know of jobs in the Records and Information Management area so they can be posted on the Jobs Blog. Members who are seeking employment or consulting opportunities can also ask their chapter's jobs information coordinator to post notices on their behalf.

All notices will be deleted upon receipt of word they have been filled, withdrawn, or expired. Any notice may be deleted after 60 days. People who are the source of a notice should be sure to let their jobs information coordinators know when the notices are obsolete or, when necessary, request that they be re-posted.

The jobs information coordinator for the Greater Seattle Chapter is the Chapter President, Roger Winters. Send notices and any questions you may have about this service to him at roger.winters@metrokc.gov.