CEO
Keeper of Public Records
The National Archives
UK
Natalie Ceeney will be presenting a keynote on Beyond Records Management: The role of a National Archive in the 21st Century on Wednesday.
Natalie Ceeney is petite, just 5ft 2in (1.6m) tall, blonde, slender and dynamic. She’s private school and Cambridge University educated, global management consultancy McKinsey & Co trained, and retail, pharmaceutical, National Health Service and British Library management experienced. She talks right to the point, sets out her thoughts directly and moves on.
She took over the then newly-renamed National Archives of U.K. (it was formerly the Public Record Office) in October 2005 and has strong ideas for its advancement. She’s a proponent and enthusiast for what she describes as “step change”. She sees any and all business as needing three horizons: “Current Practice”, “Looking at what’s out there”, and “Thinking beyond that, looking for what doesn’t exist, yet”.
Ms Ceeney sees electronic information as the world’s biggest challenge culturally and the Internet as its biggest, best and worst medium. The great gush of modern information flows was forcing vast changes for business management she said, adding: “We must change the agenda for business to accommodate the information flood. Organisations will have to restructure, create new strategies, accept and embrace the influence of strong, intelligent and entire information management.”
She is clear that she wants the institution to think across that third horizon, her “beyond that” definitive. “These are exciting times to be in information management and I couldn’t think of a better place to be sitting right now than in this hot seat at National Archives.”
Ms Ceeney’s appointment to the “hot seat” was not met with unmitigated enthusiasm by the British Press or the U.K. heritage sector. The 1990-91 President of the Cambridge University Students’ Union, mathematics and politics graduate and one-time Labour Party activist was described imprecisely and patronisingly by London’s centrist Daily Telegraph newspaper as “the woman responsible for safeguarding the documentary record of British history”.
The Telegraph credited a former Keeper of Public Records, Professor Geoffrey Martin, with the ageist remark: “It sounds a very drastic step. Thirty-four is extremely young.” And historian-journalist Sir Max Hastings, himself once editor of the paper, commented stuffily: “To end the tradition of appointing experienced scholars and archivists and start putting management consultants in their place sounds exactly the sort of thing one might expect from this Government.”
The appointment was the first to the Keeper’s post by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government. Perhaps coincidentally, a senior McKinsey partner had just been appointed as head of a Prime Ministerial policy unit.
However, former business colleagues of Ms Ceeney were more enthusiastic. The Telegraph quoted one of them saying: “She is a small tornado and very tough. She will have sympathies with the role of the Archives because she is pro-public bodies, but now she has the ruthlessness of the management consultant.”
Ms Ceeney evangelises her consultancy “ruthlessness” out in the greater recordkeeping world. She told the RMAA: “I am extremely keen to share learning and best practice across all of our organisations, and see such forums as yours as critical to doing so.”
In her first public appearance, as keynote speaker to the annual conference of the Records Management Society of Great Britain just six months after taking over the National Archive, she admonished British recordkeepers: “Just because we don’t know, doesn’t mean we should do nothing”.
She said: “We face huge, new challenges but, given out track record of success, if we continue to look ahead and influence appropriately, there is no reason why we can’t continue too raise the profile and success of records management.”
She’s very direct, but it’s leavened with a fine sense of humour. A media scribe asked her what, if anything, would make her life complete. The diminutive Keeper-to-be declared: “Being four inches taller would be good.” What makes her laugh? “Irreverence.”
But the business steel is always there. While at the British Library, she struck a deal giving Amazon.com rights to the Library’s entire catalogue as a searchable database linked to dealers’ sales lists. And she set up an encryption technology deal with Adobe and Elsevier Science, the world’s leading publishers of scientific, technical and medical journals, to deliver on-line material from 2,500 titles such as the British medical journal, The Lancet.
In an early Press interview, Ms Ceeney outlined her business philosophy: “The task for us is defined by the fact that we are the cutting edge of IT challenges. Information needs and customers’ demands are changing and developing so rapidly that everyone here has to change with them. That is the challenge we face in managing change in our business.”
Natalie Ceeney
Chief Executive and Keeper of the Public Records
The National Archives
Ruskin Avenue
Kew
Richmond TW9 4DU
United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 8876 3444
