An article by Magdalena Sjödahl, first published, in Swedish, in the Swedish journal AIT.
I have always known that I wanted to work in the public sector. One of my first positions as a newly qualified archivist, more than ten years ago, was in a document controller role (a term that was considered quite innovative and new at the time in Sweden). In addition to my responsibilities within records management and registration, I was given responsibility for various development projects at an early stage. This was despite having no particular technical educational background. At the time, I did not consider myself a particularly technical person either.
However, I soon realised that my education as an archivist had given me a foundation for understanding technological development and, perhaps even more importantly, the ability to understand information flows and the importance of long-term information management based on good structure, metadata and processes. The challenge in discussions with IT professionals was that we used different terminology to describe corresponding concepts.
Since that first position, I have had the opportunity to participate in many different types of IT projects aimed at either streamlining, facilitating or even enabling secure and reliable information management. I have worked as a requirements specialist, supplier, tester, implementer, system manager and end user. I have taken further courses in IT and digitalisation. I have learned from colleagues, from making mistakes and from getting the chance to try again.
In my current role as CEO of a small software company that has built an archiving solution, I get to be part of solving many different types of challenges related to development and secure information management. The people at Arkiwera are specialists in their respective fields. I bring the archival perspective when we discuss how the system should be designed, while others contribute the technical components or the information security perspective.
Combining different areas of expertise is the key to solving problems and challenges – that is something we firmly believe at Arkiwera. When the first lines of code were written for what is now the Arkiwera platform, none of us could have predicted that it would become the system we have today.
We started building the system as a support tool for the consultancy services we offered in digital preservation. When we invited a few customers to test the system (most of whom are still users today), we received a positive response. So we kept building. More expertise in new areas was needed.
We have tested solutions and team structures that turned out not to be right. We have started over. Hopefully, we have learned something along the way. We operate in a field where many questions still have no obvious answers, which has made the development process both challenging and rewarding.
Combining different areas of expertise and trying to bring different perspectives together is therefore something we actively strive to do, but it is often easier said than done. Within the team, we speak different professional languages. We have been trained to look at things from different perspectives. One of the people responsible for security in our platform once said, “It would be so much easier if we didn’t have users who actually logged into the platform” – a statement that did not go down particularly well with our sales team.
As an archivist working with requirements, I have learned just how difficult it is to turn a need or a wish into a sensible workflow in a system. Even when I have known exactly what I wanted to achieve, the question has still been how to get there in a smooth and practical way. Rarely have communication misunderstandings and the feeling of being lost been as apparent as when something is obvious to me as an end user, and I need to explain what I want to achieve to someone with a completely different perspective or starting point. It is easy to get stuck describing an analogue process and how something has been done, rather than focusing on what the goal actually is.
When you are an end user of a system yourself, I think we have all thought at some point: how difficult can it really be? After discussing ideas for our system with developers, UX designers, translators, information security specialists, lawyers, entrepreneurs and other knowledgeable people, I have realised that it IS difficult. It is difficult to bring together different perspectives that are, in many cases, equally important. My experience is that it is rarely the technology itself that sets the boundaries. It is conflicting perspectives, along with limitations in time and budget. The user wants simplicity. The information security specialist wants to minimise risks. The archivist wants to ensure long-term preservation and traceability. The organisation wants quick results. All of this needs to be balanced during development, and when it succeeds, innovation often emerges.
Little did I know more than ten years ago that I would one day help build a software company with a proprietary service used by organisations, not least public-sector organisations, across Europe. It has been a journey of development – technically, mentally and in terms of knowledge, both for me personally and for the team – and we are still far from reaching any kind of final destination.
At times along the way, I have felt like an archivist lost in the developers’ world. For me, being lost in the technical world has rarely been about not understanding the underlying problem. Instead, it has been about how, with our different perspectives, we can choose and advocate for such different solutions. Where I see information values, processes and regulations, the developer sees functionality, logic and lines of code. It is only when we learn to speak each other’s language that we can create solutions that actually work in practice.
Magdalena Sjödahl, CEO and Archivist. Arkiwera
