Focus on professional development to ensure RIM and IG success.

• Author: Wiler, Vicki
• Position: IN FOCUS: A Message from the Editor - Editorial

If you are not knowledgeable about information technology (IT) and adept at collaborating with IT professionals, you should consider putting these two items at the top of your list of career development goals. Authors of several articles in this issue tell us that the escalating volume of electronic records and the technologies used to create and manage them is driving the need for professional growth in these areas.

"The unabated growth of electronic information provides enterprises with a wealth of opportunities to use data and captured knowledge to make better decisions, but it also presents an ever-greater burden to the information professionals who must organize and manage it," Forrester analyst Cheryl McKinnon, IGP, writes in the cover article about the just-released results of the Forrester Research and ARMA International Records Management Survey (Q 2, 2015).

The two key information stakeholder groups, of course, are records and information management (RIM) and IT professionals. RIM professionals are instigating change, according to the survey, driving their organizations to pivot toward information governance (IG). To be effective, they must work with IT to align RIM and IT program policies and priorities --an area the survey indicates has improved slightly.

RIM professionals are "perfectly positioned" to serve as IG advisors that can help bridge the technology-created gaps in IG implementations caused by the digital deluge and the solutions spawned to manage them, Phyllis Elin writes in "More Than Paper: How RIM Can Influence IT and Shape IG." She tells how they can forge relationships with IT that will ensure their advice will be heard and trusted.

Among the technologies challenging RIM and IT professionals are many cloud-based ones...