Month: February 2021

I’ve been looking into benchmarking of records across organisations.

Benchmarking is one of the simple ways that a functional area of an organisation can show that it is a credible supplier to the organisation it serves.

The problem I’m finding is that none of the benchmarking studies address organisational performance, or even the ability to perform to objectives that make sense.

State records studies are particularly odd.

They address attitudes, knowledge, access to training and many other things.

It’s what they don’t address though that I find odd:

1. Actual compliance.
2. Outcomes and the costs to achieve them.
3. Ability to comply with administrative reviews and other reviews that records is purpose built for.
4. The impact of records on business performance.

If we can’t benchmark these types of things, how do we know we’re credible suppliers of service to our organisations?

If we can’t compare ourselves to one another, how do we know who is doing well, and who we can talk to about how we improve our practice?

How do we know we’re any good?

If you’ve found a great benchmark that’s helped you benchmark and improve your practice – I’d love to know what it was.

Is internal audit.

One of the things that keeps organisations (particularly government organisations) investing in records is the threat that the organisations process will be subject to a legal or administrative review.

So how do organisations test their ability to respond to these types of reviews effectively?

Generally they wait until they’re the subject of such a review, and then make heroic efforts to find everything they need.

But why is that?

Why isn’t internal “administrative auditing” a regular part of records management?

How do we know if we are being effective if we don’t audit?

Senior people, what’s the thing they are most focused on?

That’s an impossible question to give a single answer to, but you can bet its one or two things that are large, complex and important, and that they want to stay laser focused on.

Ultimately, this means that a records program has three types of value to an executive –

1. It can help them succeed at one of the things they are focused on.
2. It can reduce risk to the things they’re focused on.
3. It can stop them being dragged away from the thing they’re focused on.

Assurance of success, prevention of failure, and the prevention of fires that will drag them away from what they’re working on.

I think that’s it.

What do you think?

The two places are:

1. Program Governance
2. Frontline value

Program governance is a failure to have records management performance managed by line managers throughout the organisation. It’s really a failure to prove value at the executive level, and to translate that value into a framework that executives can act on.

Frontline value is a failure to establish enough “very soon, to me” type value to frontline workers.

Records managers don’t have enough power in an organisation to get people to keep records well, and they are never going to. This means that the first order of business for a records management program needs to be securing executive support.

Every records program needs the whole organisation to commit to implementing the program. Without someone who can exercise authority at the whole organisation level, the best you can have is silos of excellence – and if you can’t get senior executive support, that’s what you should aim for. Whatever piece of the organisation is underneath the most senior manager who will commit to managing their staff on records outcomes is where your effort will be most highly rewarded.

The important thing to focus on with program governance is ensuring that sanctions for non-performance are implemented with certainty. Recidivism theory tells us that certainty of punishment for a transgression has the highest correlation with non-recidivism. This means that whatever reporting mechanism you design, it needs to deliver simple, actionable information to managers so that they can act with both certainty and minimum effort.

If you get program governance right, frontline value is less important. As much as it sticks in my throat when I say that, it’s true. There are some records programs that seem to go out of their way to make things hard for frontliners, and deliver no value that a frontliner will ever see in their work – but are effective (at least in the short term) because of good program governance.

That said, frontline value is (to me) the most important component of long term success for records – both at the program level, and the industry level. Programs that fail on frontline value often don’t get to the point where they are self sustaining. They require larger amounts of continued management pressure, and sooner or later, management get tired, and move on to other things.

The simple truth is that frontliners must value the records that we ask them to keep. The value must be tangible and real, and they must have a feeling that value will be provided “very soon, to me.”

Programs that achieve this become self-policing.

Active governance becomes assurance and eventually just monitoring.

What I think is most important to realise, is that none of the issues above are technical issues, and while technical issues are important, programs will not fail or succeed purely because of them.

This should be a caution point for every records manager in their choice of daily issues to focus on. Is the next thing in your to do list a technical issue? Or an issue of executive of frontline value that’s going to really impact your chance of success of failure?

I’m really stuck on this. My conclusion is that it’s unjustifiable.

All those things that you thought of when you read the heading – and that I thought of – I can’t tell you how much they’re going to cost the organisation, and when.

In most cases, no one can.

Most organisations can’t even make educated guesses.

And I feel like we’re wasting our time trying to jusify them unless we’re dealing with something that is truly carcinogenic for our organisations, or something like a consumer data right where we MUST destroy or face penalties which are certain and large.

I feel like this is the same as security – the only time we’ll be able to get senior people to pay attention to destruction is right after an incident – the type that means our organisations have had to pay the bill for an e-discovery firm to come in and sift through everything.

And at that point, the cost benefit is likely going to fall flat because nothing other than a GDPR type fine makes the cost worth the gain.

I also have a problem with justifying destruction from a prioritisation point of view. I think the real problem with fixating on destruction, is that it costs time that could be spent on things that people really care about.

Process workers want the information they need presented to them when they need it.

Executives want information to feed their decision making processes so they can make evidence based decisions.

Customers want to be able to get records about what they’ve done with you without having to talk to a person.

And every minute and every dollar we spend on destruction is a minute and a dollar we can’t spend helping people get things done that are important to them.

Destruction is only important to us.

So I’m stuck.

How do we move forward with destruction practices?

Central to all records management is the concept of evidence.

Peter Drucker (or at least people who quote him frequently) provides us with a really important lesson about why it’s so important.

Decades of managers have been quoting Peter Drucker. He thoroughly deserves his following.

One of the quotes you’ll hear attributed to him most often is “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Managers have been using this for decades to support various ideas about measurement and courses of action they should or shouldn’t support.

The problem is that Peter Drucker never said anything like it, and if you’ve read Peter Drucker you’d know that in many ways it’s antithetical to him.

The actual quote is from W Edwards Deming (another giant of management theory and practice) who wrote that “it is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

The thing I took and continue to take from Peter Drucker is that the key in most situations is figuring out the right question to ask. In this case, I think there are two:

1. How many mistakes are being made in our organisations because they’re either not relying on evidence or relying on evidence that’s incomplete.
2. We manage the evidence about every decision our organisations have made, and every course of action they’ve taken, why aren’t people coming to get it before they make decisions?

One of the things that I’ve found about a good records classification scheme is that it is one that people can see their job in.

When people can’t see their job in a classification, they will create something that matches their job – and use that.

There’s a careful balance we need to maintain when creating classifications – which is that we need to describe how people organise their work.

When we fail at this, we’re falling into the same trap as many business process management projects by describing some theoretical situation.

In effect, we’re telling people how to think about their job – prescribing it.

The effect is the same in business process management and records – people work around the system.

While some will be comfortable with the lumping or splitting decisions that we’ve forced them to make, others will respond to the uncertainty by dealing with it in a way that is certain – which means putting the records somewhere that makes sense to them.

It’s simple to say, but very subtle. Great classification schemes describe, for the others, there’s a point at which they flip over to being prescriptive – and that’s where the danger is.

Sometimes, we will have to prescribe how people keep records and think about their job for the simple reason that it’s the best piece of risk management we can do. When we do this though, we need to recognise that we’re going to have to continually apply pressure on people to do it the way we want it to, or they’ll go back to doing it the way that makes sense – somewhere else.