The commodity in shortest supply is advocates.
People who will go out into the organisation and say “I trusted records, and they made my life better.”
Without advocates, you won’t get funding, managerial support or a mandate to do what you need to do.
The problem, is that there is almost always a huge oversupply of whiners who will actively undermine whatever you try and do.
When the ratio of whiners to records staff is hundreds to one, no matter how good you are, you’re not going to get enough budget to beat those odds.
So how do you beat those odds?
The only way I’ve seen work is to pick a winner.
A winner is the team with the biggest problem that you can easily solve, quickly and for a reasonable amount of money.
The way you make them a winner is to focus all your time and resources on them so that in six months, you’ve got 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 more advocates in your organisation.
People you’ve really delivered for.
People who will tell other people that you really delivered and made their lives better.
The catch with this idea is that we can’t run a technical project, and we can’t run a project that only delivers to unknown people far off in the future.
If what we deliver for them fulfils the technical aims of records managers, or only delivers to unknown people in the future we’ll have the opposite effect to the one we want.
So if we want to create advocates:
- We have to focus.
- We have to deliver.
- We have to improve people’s lives.
Now.
Information Governance 