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01732 759725 28 AIIM FORUM UK compliance issue – no one cares about it. You’ve got to lead with the empowerment and enablement aspect. TR: Has the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal and GDPR changed things in any way? PW: Frankly, I’m not sure that our information management professionals are the ones heading up GDPR readiness. The more you learn about it, the more you see that so much of it is documentation and process-oriented, rather than being truly holistic. That’s my opinion. I find that the people who are doing GDPR readiness in organisations aren’t the information management folks, they’re in IT or administration. As regards the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal, you can’t fight greed. We always express horror when there is a mining disaster or an oil spill. People say things like ‘They didn’t have good records management or good document management’. But that’s not true. It’s what the executives choose to do with that information, and most times they choose to hide it. It’s all about greed and you are always going to have that. TR: Is AIIM changing the services it offers in response to changes taking place in information management and the challenges your members face? PW: Yes, it is. At a high level, we need to focus on educating the people within our member organisations who can put the policy, the technology and the processes in place that let colleagues take advantage of having content management and analytics already baked into new platforms. We need to explain how they can build on those platforms to take their businesses to a whole new level. On that basis, we have three main goals this year. One is to fill the knowledge and skills gap around modern records management, which we don’t believe other parties are doing. Two, given the growth in our line of business membership, we need to create more relevant and digestible learning assets for the new information brokers. Training in classrooms to earn a Masters degree is just not going to cut it any more, so we are building brand new courses – all online and in small chunks – around AI, blockchain, RPA and the cloud. Finally, we are making changes to the one certification we have out in the marketplace – the Certified Information Professional. When we launched CIP over 6 years ago, we hoped it would be the everyman and RPA thrives on text analytics and image management and OCR. Again, our people know all about that. TR: Should the primary role of information professionals be governance and compliance or the use of data for commercial advantage? And are the two aims incompatible? PW: I hate to say it, but nobody cares about governance and compliance. You are never going to get executives excited about it. Obviously, we have to do it; we have to protect our intellectual property; and now, of course, we have to protect our customer data. That’s the cost of doing business. But, facing disruption, executives are always going to look to where there’s innovation around the customer experience. That’s going to take priority every time. The two aims are not incompatible, as long as the conversations around information change. We’ve got to move away from the idea of hanging onto information and controlling it and begin to set it free. We are trying to help our records management members change the conversation around information to focus on what information can do for business? Yes, someone has to be the steward of that. But you don’t lead with the certification, but two things were wrong with it – it was too mired in what we know as ECM and contained a lot of things that the rest of the world probably wouldn’t care about; and, secondly, it didn’t align well with our training courses – taking them wouldn’t necessarily help you pass the exam. We’ve now changed all that. We’ve made our courses more digestible and relevant and we’ve made them align with the CIP, so it does behove you to take some before doing the exam. I was a sceptic about the certification, but I took the prep course and became a CIP and I honestly believe it is now relevant for people who don’t have a long legacy in our world. So, the third goal of ours is to make sure we future-proof that with regular tweaking and updates. TR: What proportion of your members have the CIP accreditation? PW: It’s a small number, about 1,800, but we’re growing it. That’s out of 150,000 active subscribers – people who have given us permission to hold their information and who have done something with us within the last six months (if they haven’t they fall off that active status). We long ago realised that the value we bring to users and vendors is the size of our community, because of the exchange of information that goes on – the peer-to-peer networking and the content. The broader community of people who engage with us, who download research, who participate in webinars, who use our infographics or checklists and give us permission to own their details is far, far more valuable to everybody than the small number of people who pay dues and become ‘members’. So, we now have an Amazon Prime-type product. We give away lots of things for free, but if you want ...continued continued... As regards the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal, you can’t fight greed