The psychological trauma inflicted by poor records management classification schemes

What is the principal reason that people won't use a records system?

In the recent past, I spoke to a number of organisations who told me that they "just want to use SharePoint" - which means a move off one of the most widely used records systems in the industry.

Once we explored why we found that (without fail) the core reason was that the people involved had specific ways of organising their work, and the records system didn't let them organise it like that - so they wanted to work somewhere else.

What happened when they used the records system, is that they started to feel disorganised, and anxious about where they were up-to in their work. Because the way their work is structured reflects the status of their work, forcing them to organise it differently created uncertainty and anxiety.

The real problem, is that we keep trying to put them in a vice between the compliance needs of the organisation - which are expressed in our policy and classification scheme, and their often very long term professional experience of how to organise themselves so that they can get work done effectively.

In effect, we make them choose between one of two low-level ongoing psychological traumas -

1. Anxiety over whether we're going to hit them with the compliance stick one day because they have to do the "wrong" thing to organise their work effectively if our structure doesn't allow that.

2. Anxiety and uncertainty about whether they're organised and on top of their work.

In my experience, number 2 is the one that they're most afraid of. Which explains the pervasiveness of file-servers.

People use code to talk about these things. They say the records system is clunky. They tell us that they can't work out where to put things.

These are defensive routines that they are using to help themselves rationalise the ambivalence we've created by putting them in a position where they have to choose between being effective in their job, or being effective at meeting their records obligations.

The outcome is that when our classification schemes don't help them do their work, we are inflicting a low level of ongoing psychological trauma on them - and that's an awful thing that we should do our best to absolutely minimise.

What's going to be really sad is that if we move them to SharePoint and put the same structures in front of them, we're just going to wreck SharePoint like we've wrecked other records systems.