Month: March 2021

If we don’t mean it, and our organisations don’t mean it, it just makes us look silly.

Here’s how you know your organisation is serious abour compliance:

1. Your records are perfect.
2. You know how many instances of non-compliance there have been.
3. People have been fired for non-compliance.

Has anyone ever worked in that organisation?

Most people don’t put these two things together, but they are essential for two types of organisations:

1. Any organisation that expects to service a customer more than once and wants the past business to enable a good second experience.
2. Any organisation that creates an entitlement that they will be expected to follow through on later.

It’s going to shock many organisations that when they try and adopt digital service, the first thing they’re going to need to do is get their records in order.

Questions they will have to be able get a machine to answer:

1. Does the organisation know who this person is?
2. Have they done business with us before?
3. Do we have an obligation to serve them?

The only way to answer these questions, is with high quality records.

If your records can’t answer those questions it becomes a cost problem. The organisation will serve customers it isn’s supposed to, it will end up in court (by not serving customers it should), customers will choose to go elsewhere, or customers will be forced to engage via a more expensive channel in order to prove that the organisation does actually have to serve them.

There is a fourth question that’s also important – “What information are they entitled to?”

This question becomes of paramount importance when an organisation tries to build customer service portals. One of the many functions of portals is to provide people with information that they’re entitled to so that they don’t have to come and ask a person to get it for them.

Logic tells us that the information presented in a portal has to come from a records system.

These points do leave us with a good question to ask – why is it that so many organisations think that they can do digital customer service without records being involved?

Records management is a practice with thousands of years of history.

Or at least, custodial records management is.

Non-custodial records management though, isn’t the same thing.

It’s being practiced every day in systems that aren’t designed for it, by people who don’t understand it – or want to understand it.

So where is our evidence for the way we practice in this environment?

The more I read, the more I see re-interpretation of old ideas.

The problem with this is that the old ideas are based on old economics, and the new ideas are based on ideas about convenience that we don’t believe in, or that just don’t work.

Three examples –

• Our ideas about disposition are influenced by the economics of storing a box for $5/month, do they still make sense when the cost to store an electronic “box equivalent” for 100 years is less than $1?
• Sentencing on creation through integration of a business classification scheme and a disposal schedule is an idea that has been put into practice everywhere, but I find that about 2 in 100 organisations trust it enough to actually dispose of records based on the sentence, the others check manually – at $25+ an hour.
• Function/Activity/Transaction is the gold standard for classification scheme design, but does it lead to higher quality records? My own experience has been that classification schemes are often a large barrier to records system usage.

Where is the evidence about what works?

How much of what we do by default now is more dogma than effective evidence based practice?

This is a strange dichotomy that I’ve run into continually over the last few years.

I’ll talk to a records team who will tell me that they’re not responsible for the quality of the records in the system because the business are the custodians of the records.

They’ll then talk to the same business unit who are not doing what the records team wants them to do, and tell them that the records aren’t theirs, they’re the organisations.

So which is it?

What are the predictable outcomes from that option?