By Siobhan King |
May 23, 2025
Moving mountains at the annual event for information and records management specialists
It was great to catch up with you all at last week’s IRMS Conference 2025 in Birmingham.
Covering all aspects of information and records management, the theme for this year’s event was centred around The Peaky Path to Progress and effectively, there were lots of references to mountains! Despite the conference being named in reference to a popular British crime drama set in Birmingham, attendees could not be blamed for immediately thinking of mountains when considering the challenges we all face when working with records.
Metataxis Senior Consultant, Siobhan King, joined numerous professionals from the information and records management fields, to discuss current challenges in their organisations.
Indeed, she also used the mountaineering metaphor in her session “From pilot basecamp to scaling the peaks” which she presented with Melody Allsebrook from Historic England. They were both delighted to present their joint success story at the conference and share their key learnings around accelerating SharePoint adoption.
Below are her initial reflections and key learnings from over the three days:
As usual, the IRMS Conference programme was jam-packed with informative and interesting sessions. The topic of AI was ever present in many of the presentations as it increasingly becomes a reality for many records managers to get to grips with. This year also saw more discussions about data governance – which is very welcome. Many delegates agreed that there was a lot to absorb and consider.
My top three presentations
All of the presentations were excellent – but these three sessions really got me thinking:
Crossing the Streams: Integrating Information and Data Management and Governance:
Presented by Dr David Reeve and Daragh O’Brien
As soon as I saw this on the programme, I immediately got it locked in as a must attend. So often in my role, I come across organisations with disjointed approaches to data and information governance, with separate departments even at war with each other. Reeve and O’Brien made an extremely compelling argument for the need to consider data and information together. They noted that the format doesn’t matter, as it is the context you give and the frameworks you construct that are far more important. Reeve and O’Brien demonstrated how combining data and information governance drove transformation for an Irish utility company – and delivered excellent results. When the Ghostbusters crossed the streams, they were able to defeat Gozar the Gozerian with their combined strength. Think what we could do if we worked more closely with our Data Governance colleagues.
How Microsoft Purview Paves the Way to Copilot: Presented by Rob Bath
A game of two halves: Bath’s presentation first concentrated on the tools to consider when looking at rolling out Microsoft Copilot before reviewing the limitations of the tool. What I liked about this presentation was that it concentrated on achievable goals. Microsoft Purview provides an overwhelming number of solutions, so it was very much appreciated to be told where to start. Rob Bath took us through the functionality of SharePoint Advanced Management which now comes with a Copilot licence.
The second half of this paper demonstrated the limitations of Copilot (or any AI solution). It is surprisingly easy to create a hallucination that your company Social Cricket club is a member of the IPL! The point being made here is that there are some limitations of LLMs to understand content, and this is an important message to consider when deciding how to deploy Copilot in your organisation.
Data Minimisation – Can it Save the Planet?: Presented by Luke Beckley
I must admit I had my doubts about this lofty claim that data minimisation could help reduce the amount of energy used in data centres (which by the way, is more than the aviation industry). However, the message of this paper was that more effort is needed to ensure organisations do not collect data that they do not need. This point is close to my heart, as I have seen many organisations that seem to take a minesweeper approach to collecting data, without ever actually considering it properly. This paper challenged organisations to consider the purpose of data collection first, rather than mindlessly capturing everything out of some nebulous fear of missing out. This is a data protection principle that has been around for years, and I really agree with Beckley, it’s time we gave data minimisation much more attention.
What I noted about the IRMS conference, is how collegial and practical the people I spoke to were. Everyone is grappling with increasingly complex information environments. For Metataxis, this was a great opportunity to connect and learn, but most of all to contribute to the conversation. What would be great is to continue those discussions and find solutions together.
And of course, I’d like to thank all the organisers and other speakers for an engaging and interactive event!
