Why Data is beating Records for investment, and how we can fix it.

Records are important.

Data is important (sometimes).

So why is data getting all the investment, when at some level, all records are data and data of any importance is a record? I think it’s down to one thing.

People value what they rely on.

Data people are busy creating things that people will rely on.

Data people are focusing on urgent problems, and because of the nature of investment, they’re being hired for to organisational needs that are both urgent, and important.

Records is important, and always will be. But always is a very long time, and the truth is that most of what we keep simply isn’t important, and won’t have value – ever.

Data people have embraced the idea that what they’re doing has to be seen to have value now, or they just don’t get funded.

A lot of what we do is to manage information that only gets touched twice – once when it is stored, and again when it is batched for destruction. In between those events is a huge opportunity.

Within the records we keep is every decision the organisation has ever made, and the information they used to make it.

The next generation of great records managers are going to get funded by ensuring that people making decisions are relying on records to understand how they should make the decision.

The more people rely on our records of the past, the more value they will have into the future, and the more funding we will get.