While attending ARMA 2010 this week, it was clear that records managers were perplexed by mobile technologies. Mobile presents an easy back door outside of the enterprise governance systems. As many vendors explained: Sure, you could lock down Facebook on company computers, and many organizations have taken this approach, but you couldn't prevent employees from pulling out their smartphones to access it. With such sophisticated technology sitting in the pockets and purses of most employees, a smarter approach is needed.

One simple approach is to set clear guidelines around open social tools. Joyce Tompsett, principal marketing manager at EMC, says it's important to talk to employees about acceptable use of social networking tools. "Assume people are going to use [open web social tools, such as Facebook]. Figure out what your polices are and communicate that to your employees."

She adds that if you try to block it, people will work around it. To Tompsett, defining corporate policies around social media and training employees about that policy makes a lot more sense.

Liz Kofsky, Product Marketing Manager at Open Text agrees, but she says, you can't just tell them, you have to enforce the rules. "Another huge piece of the puzzle with governance  is enforcement. How do I know they're complying? That has to be put in place," she says. She adds, "It's up to organizations to ensure that it's enforced, monitored and audited."

That's one way of looking at mobile, and it's sensible from a governance perspective, but Darren Knipp, CTO at Perceptive Software sees mobile as an opportunity to bake records management into mobile applications, making it actually easier for records managers to capture the kinds of information they need to do their jobs. "As vendors, we have the ability to build these focused interfaces that can assist with the records management and retention, where it's baked in from the beginning," he says.

But system architects don't always think about this. Kimberly Samuelson, director of LaserFiche ECM, described a project by the state of California, data.ca.gov where the state made a lot of data available and invited others to build on top of that data and create mashups. It was a great idea, she explained and very successful, but when she asked the system architects about governance policies, they admitted they hadn't thought about it initially, but if they had to do it again, they probably would have. She says, companies have to think ahead about governance issues as they develop applications and create policies up front to get ahead of new technology.

Ultimately, mobile is a double-edged sword for records keepers. It makes it easy to get around policy and rules, but it could also provide an opportunity through its simplified mobile interfaces to capture records management information on the fly. Records managers will probably be dealing with both sides of this issue for some time.

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