Records managers and reducing risk with Anne Cornish

RIMPA CEO Anne Cornish discusses how records and information management professionals can maintain relevance in a world of frequent data breaches and emerging technologies like large language models (LLMs). The key, she says, is to focus on how their role is essential in reducing risk.  

They also discuss:

• How records managers have done a poor job selling themselves in the context of risk
• Why records managers need to ensure they don’t miss the next wave of technological progress  
• Why AI presents an opportunity for records managers, not a threat
• What those in the records profession should be doing today to assist their business through the challenges of the next 5 years  
• Essential skills and traits records managers need to develop to increase their relevance to the enterprise  
• Why Anne is optimistic, not pessimistic, about the future of records management

Resources

🎧 FILED S01:E11: Automating ugly freight in an evolving world | Cate Hull, Freight Exchange

🎧 FILED S01:E01: AI perspectives from a records commissioner | Pauline Toole, City of New York  

📨 FILED Newsletter: ChatGPT: Is this popular new technology a threat to data privacy?

📨 FILED Newsletter: Generative AI will offer up identifiable data if you ask nicely

Transcript

Anthony Woodward

Welcome to FILED, a monthly conversation with those at the convergence of data privacy, data security, and governance. I'm Anthony Woodward, CEO of RecordPoint, and with me today is my cohost, Kris Brown, RecordPoint's VP of product management. Hey, Kris.  

Kris Brown

Hey, Anthony. How are you?  

Anthony Woodward

Good. I'm in sunny Las Vegas today at the Snowflake conference. So, enjoying life.  

Kris Brown

Lucky to be you, a lovely day here in Brisbane, but certainly no Vegas.  

Anthony Woodward

It's BrisVegas. It's always Vegas in Brisbane. And look, Kris, I'd love if you wouldn't mind introducing our amazing guest today.  

Kris Brown

Yeah, look, I'm really keen to introduce our guest today. So, what I'll do without any further, I would say hi to Anne Cornish.

Kris Brown

Anne, how are you?  

Anne Cornish

I'm really good. Kris and Anthony. Thanks very much for having me.  

Kris Brown

So, Anne, CEO of RIMPA and a long storied history of managing information with clients as part of a partner network, as part of a business that you've run. And certainly, if you've, you've been involved in a lot of things that I've been involved in over the years as well.

Kris Brown

Mate, do you want to just give us a couple of minutes of sort of a bit of background and what your current focus is?  

Anne Cornish

A couple of minutes. There you go, Kris. Yes, so CEO of RIMPA. Well, what a long journey. It's been an amazing journey. So, yeah, you're right, Kris started, look, I'll be quite honest, started off as a mail opener or a filer in a local government in Victoria because my mum said it's either a job or school and a job came up for two weeks to do some filing at the local council and I never left.

Anne Cornish

11 years later, And I gained a whole lot of experience during that time. It was in the eighties and nineties, a lot of change. So, things went, you know, instead of just having paper, we started to have word processes and those sorts of things. So, records just started to change, which was amazing. And in Victoria, I don't know if anyone can remember who's.

Anne Cornish

I don't know if you're as old as me, but there was a gentleman by the name of Jeff Kenna who came in and introduced compulsory competitive tendering. And that meant that a lot of government, especially local government, decided to outsource their records areas, believe it or not, which was great. It was actually a good thing in the sense of, I got a redundancy and started a business and worked the business from that.

Anne Cornish

So, and I learned a lot and did a whole lot of consulting for about 27 years, which then led me to become the CEO of RIMPA. So, I'm a subject matter expert. I suppose I can still call myself that even though I haven't been a consultant for the last five years, I think I still am keeping in touch. So, subject matter expert who's with business background and the CEO of RIMPA.

Anne Cornish

So, a whole lot of things.  

Kris Brown

Yeah, so for those of the listeners who don't know what RIMPA is, did you want to just give us a quick rundown on who they are? Yep, sure.  

Anne Cornish

So, RIMPA, the long version is Records and Information Management Practitioners Alliance, global. So, in August last year, RIMPA, as we are well known, took a global status because we are no longer just Australasia, which originally was, that's what we were.

Anne Cornish

RIMPA is the peak industry body for records and information management with the objective of offering advocacy, a bigger voice.  

Kris Brown

Certainly, you and I have had lots of engagement as RIMPA professionals, but also in the marketplace. There's actually a lot of change coming in the information management and governance and even the records management space. And a lot of this is due to sort of.

Kris Brown

Technology and obviously other regulation, how do you see that evolution from your seat and being a part of that sort of industry alliance? How do you see that affecting what's happening?

Anne Cornish

As in affecting the industry or affecting the practitioners? Is that what you're referring to?  

Kris Brown

Both. So, let's start with the practitioners, your, your members.

Anne Cornish

Technology, as you well know, Kris, and I'm only preaching to the converted with you, is a major component of the information management industry. So, I think information management practitioners have been, in my opinion, and I'm going to keep saying this, my opinion, not RIMPA's opinion, my opinion, a little bit slack, possibly at times in keeping up with the trends in technology.

Anne Cornish

Anyone who's old enough, again, remembering the 80s when email came into play, and it was initially sold to everybody as being an informal discussion. tool and now have a look at it. It's the major tool. It's, it's probably the biggest records and information management system on everybody's desk where the majority of records are kept.

Anne Cornish

And I still don't think, I think we missed the boat or missed the wave at the time as records managers and didn't pick it up as being an important piece of technology that was going to change the world. And as you said, form the majority of our records. I still don't know if we've actually achieved that, Kris, but my point of all that is that let's not miss the next waves with, you know, the future of technology and AI and machine learning and all those sorts of things, because if we do, the same thing will happen, what happened with, with email in the 80s is that we'll still be trying to catch up, let's call it 40 years later, in all honesty.

Anthony Woodward

That's a really interesting point. What, what are your opinions? I realize they're not necessarily RIMPA's, as you say. What are your thoughts on how that occurs? Because there's been a couple of waves now missed by, by the industry. So, there's some big ones you know, really cresting out there, ready to break.

Anthony Woodward

How do you think we all catch those?  

Anne Cornish

I'm gonna be quite candid here. So, what I do believe is that we've gotta stop sitting on our backsides. Get out of our seats and get out of our basements or out of our offices. I don't care where you sit, it doesn't matter and get involved. That's been our problem.

Anne Cornish

I mean, you think about records managers or typically know one as introverts. We sit there and we just do BAU each day. You know, open mail. This is, I'm talking old fashioned here, open the mail, classify put a stamp on it, off you go. Deliver it. Remember the old days with the trolleys that go and deliver your mail, which is amazing, a good way of networking and collaborating, but not necessarily a practical way of using your time.

Anne Cornish

But in saying that, we’ve tended to just keep doing the same old, same old day in day out, we need to move records managers to remain sustainable. And I appreciate we're going to talk about this shortly, but we really did need to expand our skills. And technology is part of that guys. We need to have a.

Anne Cornish

Better understanding, not just speak the speak, and I think that's where we were in the 90s and the 2000s. And Kris, you can vouch for that. Kris and I worked on multiple projects together, and I sort of made an effort to speak the speak. But I can tell you, Kris could probably, and probably still could, bamboozle me with language that I'd sit there and nod my head with.

Anne Cornish

But in saying that, I probably got the gist of it. And if I had enough. Confidence in my abilities, I would question Kris, I'm sorry, Kris, I'm using you as an example here, but, or anyone who's in that IT,

Anthony Woodward

We question Kris every day.  

Anne Cornish

It's fine. When I say question, I would go, what does that mean? And I think records and information managers are really reluctant to go, what does that mean? Because it's outside of their realm of expertise or outside of their pay scale, which I used to get told quite a lot. I'm sorry. You need to move on from that. Everyone. You need to develop your skills and you need to ask the questions, but it's not just technology. While technology's great because it's certainly a solution, it's only part of the solution.

Anne Cornish

It's all the other skills that go with that. So, with technology, it comes project management skills, and it comes change management skills. Stakeholder management skills and all those things that records managers 20 years ago, or even probably even today, would say, Hey, that's not our job. Do you know, we are not, we are here to do classification and metadata and BCSS and all those sorts of things, and EDRMS and all that sort of stuff, but it's actually not true.

Anne Cornish

Okay. We are, we are bigger and better than that and I think we need to realize that. I could talk forever, guys, you know that, don't you?  

Anthony Woodward

No, absolutely. And it's a podcast. That's, that's, that's absolutely the point. It's really interesting to identify those opportunities that fall out of what you're talking about.

Anthony Woodward

You know, what, what would you say are the big elements that people in the profession should really be thinking about today and getting ready to assist their business on through the next 2, 3, 5 year kind of journey?  

Anne Cornish

We've got to start thinking about our value. So, let's be honest, if everyone went to work today and they turned on the computer and there was no information on it, you couldn't do your job.

Anne Cornish

It's as simple as that. Okay. And this is the thing, records managers, information managers, I don't really care what you call yourself. It could be pink and purple polka dots. It doesn't really matter. My point is you need to be able to sell that value. You need to actually stress to your organization and, and we as an industry need to do it as well, holistically, that without information, the world doesn't operate.

Anne Cornish

It's as simple as that. We can't make decisions. We don't know how to answer our customers. We don't know what we're doing tomorrow. We don't know where we're supposed to be. It's just information. And it's really important. The world is realizing the importance of information. And we live in the digital world and all the cliches that go with it.

Anne Cornish

To answer your question, Anthony, what do we need to start doing? We need to understand the value and I think we need to be a part of risk and governance, which we sort of are inadvertently, but the problem is I don't think we realize that we have got a big part to play in those areas. And that's again, us lacking confidence in knowing what we do and what we add, how we add value to an organization.

Anne Cornish

But the biggest thing that I can't stress enough is the ability to, and this is what I think we need in the next five years, is get rid of that introvert perception, Anthony, and start being communicators and marketers and selling what we do really well. Okay. We need to be our own PR. We need to do PR for our industry and for us as individuals.

Anne Cornish

Okay. We need to sell ourselves. So, that's where I believe.  

Kris Brown

I totally agree. And I think that you and I are sort of very much on the same page there in terms of, you know, I always call out that there's 3 main assets in an organization and 2 of them are very obvious and have all of these systems and processes in place.

Kris Brown

And that's their cash and their people. But if you take away either of those, you get the same outcome. And when you take away the information from a business, you don't manage it properly. You end up in that same place. So, I absolutely hear you when you're saying those things. And probably the interesting thing for me in this is the world has moved.

Kris Brown

And certainly, this regulation, we'll talk about that in a moment, but the world has moved to valuing that more as well, not just internally in the business or at a customer level and worrying about my own data and obviously my own privacy, but. The hacker, the cybercriminal has now really seen value in that information and their ability to collect lots of it.

Kris Brown

So, as the gatekeeper, if you will, or the organizer of that information, helping an organization to manage that better to understand their risk, as you've just said. This is now a key value point. And certainly, at a board level, more than ever, people are talking about privacy, retention, governance. Strike now is our best opportunity as there are all those additional regulations, not only coming, but have come.

Kris Brown

So, you know, with GDPR being the start out of Europe, there's CCPA and, and others in the States, you've got the Australian privacy regs that are in play, but obviously getting updated as well because of the hacks latitude and Optus. And, you know, as, as organizations, you know, we were having to deal with these people sitting under risk teams and, you know, they may understand those information management and governance concepts.

Kris Brown

They don't necessarily have the understanding that a member might have, but they're not. in the risk team, or they're not in the legal team, or now those teams are starting to come together. More recently, a couple of financial institutions I'm talking with, the professionals that I'm talking with, are labeled privacy and retention.

Kris Brown

And it might seem like they've oversimplified what information management or records management is, but at the end of the day, Privacy and retention is what the regulations are calling for. It's what the boards are talking about. It's how they're showing value in those organizations by disposing of information and obviously securing that information from a privacy perspective.

Kris Brown

Why do you think that's happening? That, that sort of change of vernacular?  

Anne Cornish

So, first I'm gonna go back a step, Kris, to your initial comment about the importance of information worldwide, globally, and with all these cyber-attacks. And that I am so frustrated that we as an industry and, can I say RIMPA are really trying that we haven't jumped on this bandwagon 'cos this is a crisis.

Anne Cornish

Let's call it a crisis that we should be jumping on and using to our advantage. And forget about, the industry as a whole, but us as individuals. This is what makes us so important. I mean, the Optus and the Medibank things where they're keeping information for so much more longer and putting themselves at risk.

Anne Cornish

And I keep using the word risk because I think that's where we fit in really well. And that's where we show value in any organization, the risk there to that information being released or being hacked was out of control, as we all know, and that's you got impacted. It was the non-customers, the old customers that got impacted.

Anne Cornish

Not so much. Yes, yourself, Kris, and a lot of others. But why aren't we jumping on it? So, I get frustrated that we as an industry as a whole, or even us Individuals don't jump on this a bit more and get involved. And I'm going to plug RIMPA a little bit. We're trying to, we're getting involved with the change in the privacy review and the legislation.

Anne Cornish

Secondly, in relation to the, specialized titling of, you know, the Privacy and Retention Officer and whatever, I think I said before, I don't care if we call ourselves pink and purple polka dots. I'll be quite honest. It's what you sell, how you sell your value to the organization and what your skills are.

Anne Cornish

It's funny. I did a bit of research before I came on today with you, but we have, everyone has to list their title and we've got some amazing ones. You know, information forensic officer is another one. Right, so, and my point of when I say this, you know, legal and governance, risk and governance, risk and value manager, data's now appearing in everyone's title or every second title quality, risk, all those sorts of things.

Anne Cornish

My point of that is, can I be quite honest with you, they're actually all doing the same job. But plus, they're doing that traditional records job, I'm hoping. And I know if they're not doing it personally, they've got people below them that are, but they're also taking on all those other skills that we talked about, the technology, the risk management, the compliance, the governance, the marketing, the communications, the change, all those sorts of things as well.

Anne Cornish

So, I'm really optimistic about the future for records and information managers. As I said, call us whatever you like. If, if we have to be. You know, Pink P&P Association in the future, as I said, pink and purple polka dots. I don't care. It really doesn't bother me because what we do is so important. If society wants to call a pink, a white fluffy thing, a dog, or if they want to call a dog a white fluffy thing, I don't really care as long as society knows what they're talking about.

Anne Cornish

If it means something to them. Does that make sense? It does. We're too big on terminology. And getting caught up on that, and records has a connotation in its own right. We've had this conversation, Kris and I have had this conversation multiple times, that the word record still has a perception around about being paper and, you know, archives.

Anne Cornish

And if you work for a records management consultancy company, you still get phone calls, people asking for, you know, the vinyl records that, you know, play songs and they sing the songs to you and that sort of stuff. My point of all that is that, yeah, the word records has probably got that connotation and we do need to upmarket with information or digital or data.

Anne Cornish

I don't mind, but as I said, call it whatever you like. I think we should be optimistic, not pessimistic about our future because it's broader and bigger. And more valued.  

Anthony Woodward

No, it's a great point. Can I ask a more controversial question to cut right through that level of controversy? Sure. Do you think the skills in the industry are actually there or do we need to inject a new set of skills and a new set of people?

Anthony Woodward

Kris and I straddle and have for the entirety of our careers, both the records world and the technology world. And there's been this really interesting shift in the technology world of bringing in, you know, originally, you know, I'm old enough when it was a lot of people who were DBAs and, you know, did funky stuff in the basement as I tell people, right?

Anthony Woodward

But a lot of people upgraded their careers, went and did more management orientated course, got more integrated with the business. I never saw that happen in the industry, in the records world. How do we get that infusion? How do we, how do we get those skills there? Cause that's what's missing, right?

Anne Cornish

Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more, Anthony. I think there are some people with those skills. I mean, there's always some people that have got those skills. Of course we need to actually use that word, inject those skills into the business. I think the millennials coming through and I'm going to use that millennials and, and younger generations.

Anne Cornish

I'm going to come through with a much broader or diverse skill set than just, as I mentioned before, BCS metadata, you know, the traditional fundamentals of records management, it's not happening now. And that's a concern to me that there's some people around that don't necessarily want to expand their skill set, which puts a lull

Anne Cornish

in our industry until the next generation comes through. And that lull could just about get, it could possibly see it gone. Do you know what I'm saying? So, we as RIMPA and as the consortium, and I harp on the consortium because I think we give us a bigger voice with thousands and thousands. I'm talking hundreds of thousands of people rather than just two and a half, three thousand members of RIMPA.

Anne Cornish

I'm talking hundreds of thousands across the world. It allows us to inject or to impose or encourage those skills sooner with a lot of other people. And a lot of our industry peak bodies across the world, and I've spoken to a lot of them, are thinking exactly the same way. That's a good thing. We've now got to bring the members along the journey with us.

Anne Cornish

They've got to be prepared to do it. It's interesting. I'm sorry to keep on about this one, but we offer vet training, as you know, at RIMPA, I don't know if you are aware, but we do offer vet training because there was a gap. So, you've got your higher education and then you've got sort of nothing. Basically, you know, unless you want to go and spend thousands and thousands of dollars to do higher education, you're not going to get a qualification.

Anne Cornish

So, we saw a gap and we've implemented it. Employers want to pay for their employees to be educated. or qualified. It's the staff that don't want to do it. Now, they don't want to do it. There's a couple of reasons. Probably, possibly don't think they should, don't need it. But there's also this factor of time as well.

Anne Cornish

And we're all time-poor. Let's be honest. We all want to have families, businesses, hobbies, sport, you know, you name it, and work. And work's no longer 37. 6 hours anymore or whatever the... 38, 40, doesn't matter. It's, it's more than that because we communicate constantly. I don't know about you guys, but, and I know I have with Kris, I've communicated with him in the middle of the night.

Anne Cornish

And globally, especially, and then that's becoming more and more because it's accessible. The point of that is, is that people are willing, employers are willing to pay, but we've got to bring them on the journey to get them the

Anne Cornish

With RIMPA, we're trying to get teasers, we're going to put modules out with event modules out, in person modules that possibly at RIMPA Live, the conference, so that we can come in and do a module for free and see that it's not that hard. Do you know what I mean? No, fantastic. So, anyone that's got any ideas of how we can encourage these skills, and I talk about this constantly, I present everywhere and have been all around the world presenting about the skills that we need and that they need to.

Anne Cornish

And I'm, get candid, get out of your seat, get out of that chair, move away from your computer, go out there and talk to the business, meet the business, get outside, go and network and professionally develop. That's, that's my soapbox for the day. There you go.  

Anthony Woodward

Absolutely. I'd love to understand, you know, to switch gears slightly, we're talking earlier about the waves that are cresting, particularly in things like AI.

Anthony Woodward

Clearly, we've covered privacy in, in some depth already in this conversation, but, but AI is this massive behemoth. And I'm going to plug a little bit of what we do here at record point and have done for a while. We're really automating a lot of the things that traditionally have been done by records managers and allowing them.

Anthony Woodward

To spend more time on the higher value things, you know, applying AI to do classification, applying AI to understand the context of data and summarize it more effectively. Our processes are really a V1 we're seeing with large language models and chat GPT and all these things that we see out there that are a bit.

Anthony Woodward

Trendy right now and inverted commas, some real changes coming into the industry. Records management is going to look really different in five years from now. How do you shape that? Cause it's one thing about business integration and justifying value. It's another one now with this technology trend that's going to automate and cause these things to come together.  

Anne Cornish

Yeah. So, the first thing we've got to do is make sure that the records managers aren't scared about this technology, and they have an understanding, which is what we've said at the start of this podcast. But this is really important that they ride this wave, right?

Anne Cornish

Don't sit back and let everyone else do it because they'll, they will lose their jobs, or they won't be involved, and they won't be valued. I think AI is more than just auto classification. And from an IM practitioner point of view, I think there's a lot more involved. It impacts the organization. So, you're just talking specifically what's impacting information managers in their day to day role.

Anne Cornish

I'm thinking that information managers need to be more involved in a whole lot of AI. Like, what's the impact of chatbots? What's the information going on in that relation? What's happening with risk modeling and the, and the artificial intelligence that's doing that, right? And how involved are we?

Anne Cornish

Because we're the ones that are going to feed the AI. They're going to learn from us. It's got to learn from somewhere. It doesn't just happen, as we all know. And so, our jobs will change where we no longer put pieces of paper on file or classify bits of mail. We now teach the rules to the systems and allow the algorithms to do what they do in the AI and have this.

Anne Cornish

But don't be scared of that. Personally, to me, that's a challenge. To me, that's exciting. And that's how records and information managers should look at it. I don't know about you guys, but, you know, after a few years doing the same old thing, it sort of gets a bit boring. Your fundamentals are always there.

Anne Cornish

Everyone should pride themselves. That's their value. And when I say they, it's the IM's value is the fundamentals. They are fully aware of the fundamentals of records and information management, you know. All the compliance requirements. And as I said, the rules that go with that—those all have to be applied in the AI world.

Anne Cornish

It's an ongoing and AI will continue to learn, and we have to continue to teach it. And that's where I see the roles long term. I just think it's a challenge.  

Anthony Woodward

And great answer. A really great answer.  

Kris Brown

Yeah. And I think to add to that, it's about helping the professionals coming through, but obviously the professionals, as you say, that are in those seats now that.

Kris Brown

AI is about amplification. AI is about taking their subject matter expertise and amplifying it across the business, doing it at a scale that they couldn't do. Generally, you would say that a worker in any industry will do the work that's in front of them and perform the work to the best, you know, you would expect that most people are doing the work to the best of their ability with the tools that they've got in front of them on any given day.

Kris Brown

And what we're saying here is, is that AI actually gives you the ability to amplify that, to scale that. Now, that scale is necessary because organizations have changed. We've had the pandemic, but there was a growing move to more flexible work. I've been involved with businesses where I've obviously worked from being more flexible than working for 15 years.

Kris Brown

I haven't been in a situation where I've had to go to an office every day for at least. 10 years. And the element behind that was that the technology allowed me to, my role allowed me to be in more places than just the one that I was physically in at any point in time. But with the pandemic and the change of systems and the move to you have to be at home, Information workers, which are the people that, you know, the records coordinators and records managers service because they're the ones producing information, move their systems, move that to away from the desktop PC away from the in house server room, everybody went cloud or if they haven't, they're going cloud.

Kris Brown

And those are organizations that really didn't ever want to, you know, we've spoken to organizations in the last 12 months. So, we're like, I'm struggling to understand how we're going to make that transition. And then there's the reverse of the organizations where it's like, we're cloud first on all day, every day.

Kris Brown

And, you know, they're celebrating the day when their last system is switched off. And some of them have done it 10 years ago. And others are, you know, in the progress of doing it now. That's the major change for the information manager. As you mentioned at the beginning, it was paper and then email. It was paper and email, then word processors.

Kris Brown

Well, now it's paper and email, word processors, and chatbots, and my day to day Zoom calls, and the 10 systems that I use for each of the individual line of businesses. There's the, you know, and each of these things gathers documents in what we would normally call documents and or records. But then there's these new forms of records in the channel conversation or the information that's in salesforce.

Kris Brown

All of this is back to the legislation, which is where the SME is. Is it evidence of a business transaction? Is it evidence of, you know, an interaction with a citizen or a, or a customer? Therefore, it needs to be managed appropriately for its appropriate retention and disposal. And that's what the professional is all about.

Kris Brown

That's what the industry is all about. The fact that it's email or word or Salesforce or in teams or as a zoom call is actually irrelevant. And because of that change, or because of that scale, tools like AI are going to help that records manager, that information governance individual, that risk privacy retention manager, AI is going to help them to reach out to all of that where they previously just wouldn't have, because we know the finance team's not going to do it.

Kris Brown

We know the asset guy's not going to do it. The HR person's actually got a better job to do. You know, they've got another job to do. The guy who works for the local government, who's driving around and, and, you know, fixing the roads or cleaning the parks or mowing the lawn, he's not going to do it. It's not his job.

Kris Brown

It's the information management professional's job to help the organization to get there. And AI is a tool that's going to help them to do that.  

Anne Cornish

Imagine how appealing, more appealing that role is now, Kris, with that, what you've just said. Then, 40 years ago, when I got involved, if you stood up at school and said, why don't you become a records manager where you put pieces of paper on file and drive trolleys around and stamp bits of correspondence.

Anne Cornish

In comparison to now, you know, you're going to be, you know, working with algorithms and teaching rules and working with AI and, and, you know, the bigger the system. It's such a much more appealing role for the younger generation than it was when I started 40 years ago. Now, 40 years ago, people didn't wake up one day and go, I'm going to be a records manager.

Anne Cornish

Believe me. And I ask this question when I present on a regular basis, and I never get a hand up. You know, who's, who woke up and went, I'm going to be a records manager. No, it was done by, you know, you were put into a government organization and that's where you started and you either liked it, you didn't, or you moved on.

Anne Cornish

It doesn't matter. My point of that is, is there weren't too many people that went and as I said, woke up and set to do it. This is going to change things, Kris, in my opinion, this introduction of AI and making the job, the same job, far more interesting to me is going to be a more appealing and long term role for the younger generation.

Anne Cornish

That's my opinion.  

Kris Brown

And let me add to that another comment, and I tell this to our grads, as a business, we bring a number of grads to our business. And, you know, especially they're technologists, they generally come in as engineers or other sort of technology roles into our organization. But because of that, Save the world is probably a really bad roll up of that, but that that mentality of leave it, leave the world a better place than you found it type situation, I talked to the societal change that we can affect and one of the really interesting things here is in the example of the latitude hack.

Kris Brown

Latitude being the, you know, buy now, pay later style, you know, go to Harvey Norman and get a loan for the couch or for the telly or whatever, you know, the six months interest free. Your big box store in America, yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, “buy now, pay in six months” type interest free deal. Generally, and certainly I've used those, but, but generally this is the person that is probably the least able to deal with their information being, Thrown out onto the internet and be made available to a hacker, a scammer or otherwise, you know, we've watched our fair share of current affair shows and read our fair share of news media posts where someone's lost tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to a phone call that was, you know, too easily targeted based on information being lost.

Kris Brown

Latitude lost a bunch of those people's information for no reason. For absolutely no reason. And as an information manager, as someone who's in that industry, that makes me really upset that we don't have the tools to make that easier. That they should have known that information should be destroyed. It was no longer valuable.

Kris Brown

Those customers should not been, should have been better protected. And we can make that societal change. Through alliances like your own of driving that back to organizations going. It's just not good enough that information has been kept beyond the length of time. It'd be like saying the banks just leave the money sitting on the counter.

Kris Brown

But you come along, you deposit your money, and they say, I'll just place it there. I'll get to that. I'm really busy at the moment. And someone just walks along and takes it. Well. Bad luck, you didn't end up in the safe, so you miss out. That's the same sort of level of negligence is probably the word. And then obviously,  

Anne Cornish

Is it negligence, Kris, or is it laziness?

Anne Cornish

Is it uneducated? Is it, is it cheaper? Hey, it's ill informed. It's cheaper. It's cheaper to keep everything than to go through and actually cull it. Think about it. Right. To get rid of stuff, you actually have to do a little bit of work. You can't just press a button and off it goes. You probably need to have a bit of a look at something before you do that.

Anne Cornish

So, that's time and resources. Business is like, it's just easy to keep it. Storage is cheap until you get hacked, and you end up, it's costing. I mean, I'm not sure if I know.  

Kris Brown

And that's, but that's, what's changed, right? Like at the board level now, if I'm the Optus chief. I would have much preferred to come online after that hack, because I'm a big believer that the hack is going to happen.

Kris Brown

It's not an if, it's a when situation. But if I was the Optus chief, I would have much preferred to be able to stand on my soapbox and go, while we were hacked, and obviously we'll look at our security and whatever else, you know, it is a bit of an inevitability. But we only had the information that we needed to keep by regulation, by law, and nothing else.

Kris Brown

That would have been a much better position for them to be in, and they would have been. Hundreds of thousands of Australians in that instance that would not have been affected. And the same is true for the Department of Justice hacks. The same is true for many, many other overseas hacks. The target is huge, and societally we can change that.

Kris Brown

That is something that this industry can change.  

Anthony Woodward

Just want to make one point on the language there. You know, the bulk of the data in these hacks, whether it's been here in the U. S. or over in Australia, the organizations did not have a right to have. Full stop. They didn't have the right to have that data any longer.

Anthony Woodward

And so, their duty of care on that data. They didn't care. They didn't take duty of care. And I think the use of the word negligence is apt because I think what we're going to see and what I think should permeate through the industry is the notion of duty of care of data governance. So, it is not acceptable.

Anthony Woodward

And I don't think it's acceptable to society to go have someone's car after you said you've returned it. It's exactly the same with your digital documents, right? Your digital assets that describe you, I should say, that's, I think, where it'd be really interesting, I think, from a professional perspective to understand how we bridge that gap.

Anthony Woodward

Because again, most of the conversations I have with people in the information sphere are still around the very basic elements, not actually discussing that duty of care. Is there anything in that space that's coming up, Anne, around duty of care and duty of care of data?  

Anne Cornish

That's like the utopia of everything.

Anne Cornish

This is, and let's harp on this again, but this is probably the biggest aspect of the global consortium that's going to take up is this, this duty of care across the board, because it's not just in one country and it's not just in one spot. We need to look at this globally. I just don't think we can do this on our own in Australia or in America or, or New Zealand.

Anne Cornish

It doesn't matter where you are. It's about educating and selling, and I think, and I hate to say this, but unfortunate for the Optus of the Medibank of the world where I believe Optus lost 30% of their clients, their current customers, as a result of that breach. That's huge money. That's, we're talking dollars here.

Anne Cornish

It's those sorts of lessons learn that other businesses will listen to, if that makes sense. It's when it hits the pocket, as we all know, is when they start to listen and that unfortunately has to happen more. To get the message across, in my opinion, to get it across quickly. We saw it with COVID, right?

Anne Cornish

No one knew COVID was going to happen, then all of a sudden, Kris, you mentioned it, COVID came, everyone worked from home, we all became, everyone became digital. Now those, organizations still to this day, and it's what, four years on, would not have been digital in the way they are now. COVID pushed that to happen.

Anne Cornish

I'm certainly not suggesting we have a COVID at home, but my point is, if it unfortunately takes a few more hacks, and Kris is right, it's going to happen. We think we're on top of it and then they get better, and they get better again. They're always going to be steps ahead of us in, in, in my opinion.

Anne Cornish

I agree. As you said, it's not necessarily, I don't know about when, but probable, it's quite highly likely it's going to happen. The more it does happen, the more that the world and society is going to understand and realize this. The other care is about. We as individuals, where we go anywhere now, and we just give information out left, right and center.

Anne Cornish

Right? We're really, really, we're negligent too, or negligent or naive, I don't know what it might be. Is, you know, you're talking about, we sign up for things on the internet, we give our name, our address, our email, our phone numbers, our gender, the number of employees. How many times a day do you answer those questions to get an e book or a, to sign up for a conference and those sorts of things.

Anne Cornish

My point of that is it's a bit of a two way street, Anthony. I'm, I'm probably getting a little bit soap box again, but my, yeah, there's a whole lot of, it's a big conversation around that particular topic, probably another podcast in its own right, to be honest, just on that, but yes, there's this Anthony, to answer your question, we need to do something.

Anne Cornish

I don't have all the answers, but I think collectively, if we, and I'm talking vendors, the, the peak bodies, the regulators, really important that we all work together here and not. Not disparately. That's, I think that's the big, if we can start that way, we've, we're already on the right road.  

Anthony Woodward

No, fantastic.

Anthony Woodward

And we've covered a lot of ground here in the conversation and really appreciate your time. Obviously, some key trends. We really want to try and get a whole bunch of more multidisciplinary set of skills in, in the profession and in the industry in total. I love this notion of the millennials coming through and changing things.

Anthony Woodward

And I think we'll all be looking forward to seeing some of that impact and some of those processes as time goes on. But, you know, really thank you for making the time and sitting down with us today. It's been a great conversation, a great chat. I know we could probably all go on for hours and I'm sure I can buy you a beer and we can continue this.

Anthony Woodward

But yeah,  

Kris Brown

Look, and thank you, Anne, for the engaging chat. Look, we've had a great time having you on.  

Anne Cornish

Thanks guys, pleasure.

Kris Brown

Where can people find you if they want to hear more from Anne and RIMPA?  

Anne Cornish

Yes. So, just go to the RIMPA website. It's RIMPA. com. au. Or they can contact us via, or contact me via email, which is annecornish@rimpa.com.Au. We're always here to help. I'm sure they'll see me around Kris. I seem to be, my head seems to be everywhere at the moment, which is great for some and not for others, but anyway, that's all good...  

Anthony Woodward

Thank you, well I'm Anthony Woodward and that was this edition of FILED. Head to recordpoint.com/filed if you want to see a full backlist of episodes and subscribe to the podcast that we publish every month. And you can also get the monthly newsletter that we publish under the Fylde logo as well with some really interesting topics in that.

Kris Brown

And you can follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, search for RecordPoint and you'll find us just look for Rex, our dog. And please remember to subscribe to this podcast on whatever platform you use.  

Anthony Woodward

Catch you next month. Thanks.

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