Wrestling with managing risk and delivering value through Records, Information, Data and Knowledge.
People go to a records management system for two basic purposes:
For every additional function that you display for your user, that’s one more thing they have to remember.
One more bit of complexity to get in the way of what you want them to do.
Fast response = important system.
Slow response = unimportant system.
I commonly have records teams tell me that users don’t take Records seriously.
Then they tell me that it takes five days to respond to a problem.
Defining a record is an organisational policy decision.
It’s the organisations way of saying “this information is important enough for us to write a policy to make sure we handle it properly”.
I read an article recently that said workers “don’t have time for drag and drop” – as some kind of excuse for why they weren’t using a records management system.
It’s crap.
We have time for coffee.
Lunch.
Toilet breaks.
Talking to co-workers about the weekend.
Endless meetings that generally achieve nothing.
Spending 40% of our time looking for information.
And we drag and drop 300 times a day.
Somehow when we ask people to drag and drop into a records system, they don’t have time for it.
It’s rubbish, records are part of peoples jobs because the organisation says that the information is important, and needs to be kept.
If people don’t have time to do their jobs, why aren’t they being performance managed?
If managers can’t get their teams to do their jobs, why aren’t they being performance managed?
Why do we accept the failure to link policy to practice?
Is the change from legally mandated retention of records, to required destruction of records.
Current laws mandate that an organisation must hold specific data for at least a certain period of time.
The trend in privacy legislation all over the world, is to mandate that organisations must destroy it at a certain time, or for certain reasons.
Many organisations that I’m talking to are deciding that data disposal is too complex to implement, and storage is so cheap that there’s just no point.
In many cases, they’re then adopting systems that have no capacity to dispose of information programatically.
It’s a cheap decision now.
It’s going to get very expensive.
For a Records Manager, this problem is routine. It’s just what they do.
Every organisation is going to need the capability to destroy information programatically to exist in the information economy of the future.
Every organisation is going to need a Records Manager.
There’s a simple relationship between maturity, and the way an organisation uses “compliance”.
Organisations with low maturity use “compliance” to describe compliance imposed externally.
Organisations with high maturity use it to describe compliance driven internally by organisational policy.
Policy is simply a tool of organisational agreement. Its function is to make clear how the organisation should behave, and to remove individual decision making power about an issue.
Policy for instance, could mandate that information is only ever to be captured once. Compliance would require information is re-used, rather than recaptured.
If your organisation regularly uses phrases like “it can’t just be about compliance”, they’re both wrong, and missing opportunities to structure and standardise organisational action. Everything can be about compliance, it’s the mark of a mature, deliberative, policy driven organisation, and it can absolutely be a way to win.
The two largest constraints on your strategic options are:
Authority determines the change you can get funded.
Culture determines to your ability execute change.
The best strategies make full use of the authority and culture of the organisation.
The worst strategies fail to take them into account – and they fail.
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:
“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.
When simplified far enough, every process has informational inputs, a process of decision making with outputs, then a set of actions that follow from that decision.
So why aren’t records systems structured like this?
For routine processes, if there are four inputs, why aren’t there placeholders for those four inputs?
Something to say “this object goes here” and “it’s here” or, “it’s not here”, and to help us assess completeness, and provide meta-data so we can report on completeness.
It seems like an obvious thing to do – so why isn’t it done routinely?
Information Governance 