Certification

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There Goes AIIM CIP

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Zombieland-Shot Bill MurrayWhen I wrote about the state of the information professional community last week, I really didn’t think I would be revisiting the topic so soon. While we can self-organize using Meetup, having a national association really makes a difference in the success of every community effort.

What made AIIM valuable in this role was their approach to content and information. They weren’t all about records management and the controlling of information. The focus on on using information to address business needs. This included records management but wasn’t constrained by it.

The Certified Information Professional (CIP) was an important feature of AIIM. It provided a valid measure of an information professional. It was a valid measure that needed some nurturing to gain market traction. And then last week, AIIM killed it.

CIP Suffers a True Death

AIIM not caring about the CIP has been apparent for a long time. The marketing of it beyond the association has been sparse. Back in December of 2015, they even cancelled the CIP briefly before the community rose-up to protest.

This is worse.

They have crippled the certification. Jesse Wilkins laid out the issues with what AIIM has done point-by-point. I want to focus on two key aspects, the elimination of Continuing Education Units (CEUs) and opening-up the exam.

CEUs Mean Something

As anyone who has been in this industry for any significant period of time will tell you, the fundamentals have not changed. It is everything else that has changed beginning with the technology. Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions have changed our strategies, as has the advent of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure for application infrastructure. That has had tremendous implications for how we manage information.

While information professionals may not need to learn the ins-and-outs of these technologies, they do need to understand how the technology has changed things. Conference sessions, trainings, webinars, and other events serve an important way to keep up with all the changes. When measured as CEUs, they show that you are working to maintain your expertise.

And I will tell you with absolute certainty, I prefer tracking CEUs to taking the exam again. Any certification exam worth its measure is not an easy or pleasant experience.

Dying a True Death

What they have done to the exam actually killed the CIP. It is now open-book, unproctored, and allows for unlimited retakes. While this means anyone with Google or a smart friend can eventually pass the exam, it also means that the questions are now compromised.

The problem now is that the CIP exam questions are now public domain. Anyone can (and likely already has) go in, capture all of the exam questions, and sell the answers online. Knowing the Internet, they’ll be out there for free shortly thereafter. Regardless of the price, moving it back to a proctored exam now wouldn’t matter. the exam questions are compromised so new ones would need to be created to become a valid certification again.

Last time, AIIM simply took the CIP away. When they reversed course, turning it back on was easy enough. The only harm to the CIP was to its reputation.

They really killed the CIP this time.

What is Next For AIIM?

That is a really good question. The chapter network is dead after years of neglect. The CIP no longer has value. AIIM still has a strong webinar program, reasonable research, and lots of training. However, you don’t need to be a member of AIIM to partake in those.

As for the conference, we are still in a pandemic. Its value is really unknown.

AIIM needs to decide what they want to be going forward. With Peggy Winton ending her tenure, now is the time to define a vision and follow it. Are they an association for information professionals? Are they a vendor association? Are they a marketing firm that collects names, sells it to vendors, and makes money off of training on the side?

That last one is a business plan, not a vision.

Now is the time to answer that question. The next leader of AIIM needs to commit the organization to that vision and move them there. And they need to do it soon while there is still enough value remaining at AIIM to make it worth saving.

Moving AIIM’s Certified Information Professional Forward

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New York CityIn December, the industry was faced with the prospect of a long needed certification being removed from the market. After the community protested that we need the CIP, AIIM backed off from closing the CIP and committed to updating it to reflect the changes in the industry since the CIP’s inception.

So far so good.

Now we the industry need to help AIIM make the CIP better. Chris Walker had some thoughts on ways to make the CIP more successful. Jesse Wilkins who runs the CIP program for AIIM made some requests from the industry on how we can support the CIP.

Now after having existing CIPs review an updated exam outline, AIIM is asking the industry to review the outline by this Friday, February 12.

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The CIP, A Lost Opportunity

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[EDIT: 1 week after killing it, AIIM restored the CIP after the community’s feelings about the CIP became known. Read my initial thoughts.]

Sadness from Inside Out CryingFor those that may not have heard, AIIM is killing off the Certified Information Professional (CIP) certification.

We’d like to share an exciting development with you.

To categorize the news as disappointing is a massive understatement. AIIM dumping the news on a Friday afternoon shows that AIIM knew that this would not be well received. In many ways I feel that AIIM has turned its back on the industry with this action. I am just a bit angry at that development.

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My CIP Breakdown

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A few weeks back, I asked readers how they thought I did on the different sections on my Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam.image I was curious where people thought my weak points were based on what they knew of my experience, from reading my blog, and other sources. The goal was to see how my experience, shared publically over the years, matched-up with the exam.

Well, the results are in. As I write this, there are 23 votes but as one is from me, I’ll throw it out. Before I break down the voting, let me share the answers.

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Translating Experience to the CIP

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When I took the Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam back in January, I didn’t study due to a bet. This made the process more challenging than necessary. What I wanted to do today was see if you could guess which area I scored the lowest.

I’m not leaving you without any information. You can always look at what I’ve been blogging about for clues. There is also my LinkedIn profile which will tell you what I’ve done over my career. Finally, checking out what each domain area in the CIP exam covers should help you match that all together.

This of course, begs the question, what do you get for guessing correctly? That is a tough one. The poll is anonymous, so it will be hard to reward individuals…so let’s crowdsource. I’ll take suggestions for all readers (making me publicly confess some dark secret of some sort) and for those readers that share their correct guess in the comments prior to my announcing results.

I’ll run this poll for one week. At the end I’ll share the correct answer, the area that I knew the best, and what areas I missed a question. This should help people determine what areas they may be lacking knowledge in as a supplement to the Sample Exam.

What Being a Certified Information Professional Says

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Certifiied Information Professional (CIP) logoIt’s been almost six months since I took and passed the CIP exam, becoming a Certified Information Professional. At that time I said I thought it was a valid measure of someone’s worth as an Information Professional. Since then, everyone I’ve talked to that has taken the exam has concurred.

If it is a valid measure, then those who have become a CIP are the kind of person you want in a senior role on any Information-centric project. Right? Is that a true statement?

What about a Big Data project?

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The “Better” Information Professional

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Normally I don’t like to post too quickly on a specific topic. This is because I like people to digest the previous post and let it bounce around the net a bit. Today calls for an exception.

As I discussed, I took AIIM’s new Certified Information Professional exam cold. While I did want to judge the exam, there was a second reason for taking it cold. I bet Cheryl McKinnon that I could score higher then her without studying. While I wasn’t overly confident, I figured the odds were even and the conditions of the bet weren’t onerous.

Well, I lost. Cheryl, a vice president of MARKETING, received a higher score. She is the better CIP.

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Certified Information Professional, A Valid Measure

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Yesterday I talked a little about why the concept of a Certified Information Professional is important to making Information Management a real profession and the gap that it is aiming to fill. Today I want to talk about the exam itself and whether or not it is a good measurement tool.

I’m not going to bore you with all the details on how the exam was prepared by outside experts or any of that. While important, that isn’t a true measure. I think the true measure is the opinions of the battle-scarred veterans of the Information wars. Being one, I offer my opinion here to start building a consensus.

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Becoming a Certified Information Professional

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Certifiied Information Professional (CIP) logoToday I went out and passed AIIM’s Certified Information Professional exam. There are a lot of thoughts I want to share around this action, but it is going to take a couple of posts. In this post I am going to cover the Why. Later I will cover the What.

The first thing I want to say is that working for AIIM is not the reason I took the exam. My original goal had been to listen to feedback from others before I took the exam. It was always in my 2012 plans. Joining AIIM just moved me from the laggard position to that of the evaluator.

After all, if I was going to be the lead Information Professional at AIIM I should at least check out the certification sooner rather than later.

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Defining an Documentum Architect, An Open Letter

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In the next few weeks, a number of Documentum Architects will be gathering in Pleasanton, CA to define a Documentum Architect’s job description. I use the term Architect loosely because I imagine that for every true Architect that has been invited, at least one Documentum Developer has been invited as well. I could be wrong, but I know from experience that a lot of Architects out there are just senior developers.

However, that isn’t the point of my post. Due to conflicts that are preventing me from traveling to the West Coast for anything outside of a family emergency, I am was unable to accept my invitation to attend the Job Task Analysis (JTA) Workshop. The JTA workshop is the first step to building the certification exam that is due out by the end of the year. So I am writing an open letter to the actual attendees on the subject.

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