Month: February 2020

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”.

Create dependency.

When people depend on what you do to get their job done, they’ll value what you do (as long as you’re good for them). 

When they value what you do, they’ll fight for it, instead of fighting to replace it.

Unfortunately, records is often only a last stop.

This means that people only depend on records when they have a crisis.

And then they get it.

So we can wait for everyone to have an individual crisis, or create day to day dependency, and have everyone fighting for us from day one (whether they know it or not).

I think there are two reasons:

1. We don’t discuss the cost of alternative ways of maintaining compliance.
2. We don’t maintain running tallies of how much productive value the system delivers.

“Why are we paying this bill every year” is a very different question when we know the cost of alternatives, and know how much of a cost reduction or productivity improvement we’re delivering through the system.