Innovation and why records management is in danger of disappearing
One of the lessons of the last 20 years, is that compliance approaches to records don't work - or if they do, they only work in very limited circumstances. If you're in the public service (like almost all of my clients) - you aren't in those limited circumstances, because you need everyone to keep everything.
Under one particular innovation typology, there are two different types of innovation -
Continuous - the type of innovation that lets you keep doing what you’ve always been doing, but lets you do it a little better.
Discontinuous innovation - the type that requires you to change in order to gain from it, and can also become the mainstream - replacing what came before it with something different.
The question I want to ask, is what motivates innovation?
When current practices are working - it's a desire to get better.
When current practices aren't working, it has to be a desire to regain some level of effectiveness.
The challenge with changing when things aren't working, is that continuous innovation is off the table.
Continuous innovation lets you do the same things - but faster and more efficiently.
When things aren't working, continuous innovation is insane - it's continuing to do the same thing slightly more efficiently while expecting different results.
Innovating so you can get poor results more efficiently is a great way to say to your organisation "give us less money."
Incidentally, what's happening to capture rates and budget for records in most organisations?
When things aren't working, the only rational thing to do is find some other method of achieving the result that you want.
That's discontinuous innovation.
The challenge, is that discontinuous innovation means that you basically need to learn a new job.
If you need discontinuous innovation, the job you know how to do is no longer fit for purpose.
Personally, I think we are at a point where discontinuous innovation is the only path forward.
The evidence for it, is how effective traditional models are - and we have a good proxy for that in the capture rate of records systems.
There's a view by many, that if we just adopt the same approach in a new system, that things will work out.
Which fights with the evidence presented by the many hundreds of system changes over the last two decades, which have had no impact - other than to make things worse for the people who actually liked the old system.
So what I think we need, is discontinuous innovation.
Some will balk at that, because to them, records is about a set of practicess that are immutable and unchangeable (despite often only being invented in the last 50 years).
The question that I think we as a professional group have to ask ourselves, is why do we exist?
Do we exist to help put the right information in the hands of the right people at the right time and level of quality?
Or do we exist to PUT YOUR RECORDS HERE so we can manually sentence them and pretend our organisations will let us hit people with sticks when they aren't where they're supposed to be?
If the profession is all about the power of the right information - then discontinuous innovation is fine, and records management has a bright future - because the method doesn't matter when it's all about a goal or underlying purpose.
If it's all about an underlying purpose - then the way we get there doesn't matter.
It means that we can embrace information governance, and data management, and data governance, and information architecture, and AI - and 50 other things that aren't currently part of our repertoire.
Because the only thing that's important is the right information, in the right place, at the right time.
Anything that doesn't deliver that, can go.
And to answer the provocation in the title that started this article.
There's a great HBR article about the secrets to strategy execution that isolates the factors that most impact on strategy execution.
What's number 1?
"Making sure information flows where it needs to go."
It doesn't say anything about EDRMS.
Here's a link if you're interested - hbr.org/2008/06/the-secrets-to-successful-strategy-execution
The question should really be, are you about helping your organisation execute successfully?
If you are - your brand of records has a future, and that future is all about the value of the right information.
If you think that some element of records practice is more important than helping your organisation execute successfully, I think your future is smaller and smaller budgets, and more and more frustration. And one day, there won't be enough budget - even for you.
Right information, right place, right time, right level of quality - that's the past and future of records.