Beware the Smoking Gun Was Old Mother Hubbard Right

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Beware the Smoking Gun - Was Old Mother Hubbard
right?
Michael Moss HATII
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The Smoking Gun Recordkeeping and
Accountability Sue McKemmish 1998 http//www.sims
.monash.edu.au/research/rcrg/publications/recordsc
ontinuum/smoking.html
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Information management is just a component of
risk management.

• IPR
• Information Governance
• Evidence
• All issues of RISK
• The Orange Book- Management of Risk - Principles
  and Concept HM Treasury 2004.
  http//www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/3/5/FE66035B-B
  CDC-D4B3-11057A7707D2521F.pdf

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• Welcome Eliot Spizer
• Merrill Lynch POS email - result was 1.4
  billion in compensation and fines paid by the
  brokerages and investment banks.
• Marsh McLennan contingent commissions.
• Entertainment scams.

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As Alistair Darling knows the interrelationship
between accountable recordkeeping and public
accountability can be most demonstrated through
the failures, spectacularly. Sue McKemmish
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Where are those discs now?
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Richard Thomas, Information Commissioner, said

• Any system was only as good as its weakest link,
• The alarm bells must now ring in every
  organisation about the risks of not protecting
  peoples personal information properly,
• it is imperative that organisations earn public
  trust and confidence by addressing security and
  other data protection safeguards with the utmost
  vigour,
• Searching questions need to be answered about
  systems, procedures and human error inside both
  HMRC and NAO.

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systems, procedures and human error?

• We have neglected other ideas such as
  motivation and context management.
• Our minds have been marinated by digitisation.
• We lose not only analogue objects and artefacts,
  but analogue ways of thinking.
• Tara Brabazon, THES, 16 November 2007, author of
  The University of Google  education in the
  (post) information age (Aldershot  Ashgate,
  2007).

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Miss Crowe and Miss Ivory

• The activities of their department seemed to be
  shrouded in mystery something to do with
  records or filing, it was thought, nobody knew
  for certain, but it was evidently womens work
  the kind of thing that could easily be replaced
  by a computer.
• Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn, 1977.

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The kind of people who work quietly, doing good
by stealth, as it were.
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The Consequence

• Loss of processes that had taken hundreds of
  years to evolve.
• Reflected in loss of context for much
  information.
• The collapse of the back office into the front
  office.
• Reflected in loss of fiduciary protection.

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Governance who is responsible?

• Barings, Enron, WorldCom
• Sarbanes Oxley, Basel 2
• Audit and Risk Management Committees
• Role of the non-executives Higgs report 2003

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Homilies

• You do not have to comply. You chose to comply
  within a framework of risk.
• If you complied with everything, you would do
  nothing but comply.

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Managing risk

• Contingent liabilities the smoking guns.
• Long arm of discovery in global markets.
• Inclination to destroy.
• Curation will be appropriate to the risk.
• Process, process, process.

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Managing the asset

• They are an asset as well as a liability.
• We need to keep some records.
• Balancing the risk.
• A business case.
• Process, process, process.
• espida project
• http//www.gla.ac.uk/espida/

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Do not get blamed risk is a corporate
responsibility.

• . . . an office junior at the HMRC is being made
  a scapegoat for failures by more senior managers.
  That worker, who remains unnamed, was in hiding
  last night as the police search for the missing
  discs continued and the HMRC confirmed he was
  facing the sack. The man, who is understood to
  work in the IT department of the Child Benefit
  Agency, has been put up in a hotel with a minder
  to protect his identity as the clamour for his
  name to be published intensifies.
• Independent  22 November 2007

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Information managers are junior managers be
warned!You do not want to go to an hotel.
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Old Mother HubbardWent to the cupboardTo get
her poor doggie a bone,When she got thereThe
cupboard was bareSo the poor little doggie had
none.
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Was she right?

• Can we afford to give the dog a bone?
• Will it depend where we are coming from?

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The End M.Moss_at_Hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk