A walk in the cloud: Internet- or "cloud"-based tools, are making their way--sanctioned or not--into more and more workplaces. Two records management experts suggest how organizations can leverage their benefits while mitigating their risks.

• Author: Cunningham, Patrick

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Perhaps no technology buzzword has engendered as much discussion in records management circles as Web 2.0. It's been hailed as everything from the solution to all of our information management problems to the death of records management as a discipline. It's been the target of extensive discussion on a number of records-related e-mail lists, including those based in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. And it's even the subject of a book by Steve Bailey, Managing the Crowd: Rethinking Records Management for the Web 2.0 World. (See a review of this book on page 50.) But what is Web 2.0 and why should organizations care about it?

The 'Cloud' as the Web 2.0 Foundation

"Web 2.0" has at least as many definitions as "records." Tim O'Reilly, publisher of O'Reilly Media and widely credited with coining the term, defines Web 2.0 as

... the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them (emphasis added). In other words, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and applications like them are successful precisely because they get better as more people use them, whether to create information or merely to consume it. This is already making an impact on the way organizations create information--and must be understood in order for organizations to manage the information that is being created.

Web 2.0 tools generally provide three main classes of functionality, regardless of the specific capabilities of the tool:

1. The Web as Platform: The application and the data it creates reside "in the cloud," hosted by a third party. It is generally accessed through a web browser--and may not be available at all in the absence of Internet access or if the application provider goes down.

2. Participation: The tools make it easy to create content by hiding or eliminating complexity. Google Docs and Zoho Write don't offer anything near the capabilities of Microsoft Word, but they offer enough capabilities for most users and in most circumstances. Similarly, blogs and wikis make it easy for users to create and consume content or collaborate.

3. Emergence: Web 2.0 tools allow users to create their own content with few or no rules or restrictions. Instead of saving information into enterprise repositories with access...