Category: Uncategorized

Records Managers – do you know how long a compliance inspection takes you?

Karl MelroseLeave a comment

18 months ago, I had a chat to a regulation expert in local government. 

He explained how he thought about the work that he did.

It came down to this:

  1. We know that it takes 6 hours to complete an audit.
  2. We know that we need to do a certain number each year.
  3. We’ve asked for a budget that lets us do slightly more than that.

3 months ago, his council won an award for effectiveness in the area that he regulates.

I thought that they’re questions worth asking about Records practice:

  1. How long does a compliance audit take?
  2. How much time does the remediation/training etc. take?
  3. How many are you likely to need to do?
  4. How much budget do you need to do that?

The quality of Records that your organisation is producing probably depends heavily on whether you’re getting the funding you need for audit.

Great Records Management is largely about composition.

Karl MelroseLeave a comment

When your auditors turn up, they will ask you for your records, because your records are evidence of compliance.

Records are almost always many pieces of information, proving compliance means that you need to show all of them.

This makes records management as much a composition challenge, as it is a capture challenge.

Mostly, organisations don’t fail audit because the information isn’t present somewhere in their organisation. They fail audit because they can’t find and compose that information into a complete record under time pressure.

Great records programs solve this challenge ahead of time, and present a complete record.

Then audit is easy.

The problem for the image of the Records Management profession is Information Management (and the internet).

Karl MelroseLeave a comment

I think Records Management has an image problem.

I think this is because the average employee of a major organisation doesn’t understand it, so they don’t respect it, or know to ask for it even when the desperately need it.

In most cases I think they confuse Records with Information, and in most organisations have very little idea what each is fundamentally designed to do.

I think this is causing two problems for Records Management as a profession –

  1. Poor perception of records management and the value it provides in organisations that have made an investment in it.
  2. Failure to understand what Records Management can deliver in organisations that haven’t made an investment in it.

I think the source of the problem is easy to understand. From a non-technical outsiders view, Records and Information Management largely look the same.

They both have heavy investments in technology and they are both responsible for large volumes of information.

These same outsiders have also been convinced that it’s all the new oil. When they go to records, they expect that they’ll have a new oil information commodity experience. This causes a gap between what someone gets when they go to records, and what they expect to get, and I think that does an immense amount of harm to the Records Management brand.

I think the perception problem is caused by a lack of clear identity for Records Management in the broader community. I also think it has been exacerbated by the tendency to put Records and Information together when they have different aims and skill sets (which isn’t to say people can’t have and do both).

The longer Records Management continues without a clear brand and understanding, the longer I believe that the Records Management profession will be under-appreciated, and relatively unknown in some industries that desperately need it (Banking, Aged Care and Mental Health Care spring to mind).

One clear sign that your records program isn’t working.

Karl MelroseLeave a comment

Is no destruction.

Comfort with destroying records is a symbol of trust.

Trust that the records program is good, that it was implemented well, and that people are doing what they are supposed to do – so the records are correct.

When trust is high, destruction is easy, and it gets done.

When destruction is hard, it’s because trust is low.

So people don’t do it.

New research paper examining some considerations for switching official communication from paper to digital.

Karl MelroseLeave a comment

A new paper has been published in the Government Information Quarterly titled “Paper beats ping: On the effect of an increasing separation of notification and content due to digitization of government communication“.

The paper examines a number of factors that influence how likely a recipient is to immediately access a message on receipt of a notification. This is important for anyone considering taking a process digital, because there are assumptions about how people consume paper messages that we don’t notice until we change them.

Simply, when we get a letter, we generally open it, and read it.

This behavioural assumption is built into every piece of legislative communication that goes in the mail.

Email also fulfils the same basic function.

When government agencies digitise however, the need to ensure secure and confidential communications makes email unusable as a messaging method. The general trend in government agencies has been to notify using an unsecured channel, and then direct the user to an official portal to collect their message.

Under this architecture, the act of consuming the notification, and consuming the message are separate. There’s also friction in the form of the need to switch applications and remember logins and passwords. So we can’t assume that the notification and the consumption of the message will happen simultaneously as they do with mail.

This becomes a problem when official communication requires time based actions that are built on paper world assumptions.

This paper examines a number of factors to understand what happens when we make this shift, and how message delivery method impacts the likelihood that a recipient will consume a message quickly on receipt of notification.

The paper considers:

  • Message delivery channel
  • Operational skill level – skills to operate technology.
  • Informational skill level – skills used to search and find with accuracy.
  • Expectation that the message content is negative or positive.

The paper reaches a number of findings:

  • Paper messages have the shortest gap between notification and consumption, and people receiving digital notifications consume messages significantly more slowly.
  • People with poorer operational skills are more likely to access a message immediately.
  • People with better informational skills are more likely to access a message quickly.
  • Expectation has no impact on the speed with which messages were accessed.

It is important to note that this research used a vignette survey methodology. Which is to say that it asked people what they WOULD do in certain scenarios, it didn’t measure what they did do. That said, the Dutch government did provide that more than 1/3 of messages on their myGovernment service remain unread three weeks after notification. While this is anecdotally satisfying, it is not possible to say whether the same is true for paper.

The general conclusion that we need to think differently about communication that happens digitally vs on paper is well made.

My take away from the paper is that agencies that are considering moving to digital should consider that the economics of attention, and of notification and delivery change substantially. A letter costs $1 or more to send, and the best we can do is assume consumption of the message. This means that a certain percentage of enforcement actions will always fail because of routine administrative errors, or missed communications that are unknown until enforcement actions have escalated.

With digital channels, we can notify many times, and gain certainty that consumption of the message has occurred for a fraction of the direct cost. When messages have not been consumed, agencies could put escalation paths in place to higher cost methods of communication that provide similar levels of certainty. Ultimately, this could lead to faster and more certain outcomes.

You can find the paper at the link below:

Paper beats ping: On the effect of an increasing separation of notification and content due to digitization of government communication

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2019.101396