If we know anything about complexity, it’s that people run from it.
Every information system is a decision about how much knowledge the user should have.
The more knowledge we force the user to have, the harder it is to get started, and to keep going.
The more knowledge the user has, the faster and further we can go.
Each has a cost, and there is no one size fits all.
If it’s too simple and we have power users, we get problems associated with people wanting to organise more for efficiency and not being able to.
If it’s too complex, we get users putting things where they don’t belong, or not using the system because they can’t understand it.
It’s always an optimising problem.
Records is complicated. We get to make the decision about how much of that complication we present to our users. If we’re presenting all the available complexity to users directly, we’re always going to be headed for failure.
Records systems should take the complexity of all of our organisations compliance and information processing requirements, and present them to users in a way that is appropriately simplified.
The question is always “how much can our users handle”.
Information Governance 