This blog started life as my attempt to understand the significant questions I had about information and records management.

I still have questions, but I also have a point of view now about what has gone wrong for records management.

This blog is about those questions, and that point of view.

The overall goal is to find people and ways of fixing the problems that we have in records management, because it’s far more important than its current professional stature suggests, and we need it more than we ever have before.

The original about blurb from October of 2019 for informationgovernance.blog

“We keep failing audits”

– Organisation that doesn’t know what Records Management is.

“It takes us twice as long as our competitors to process a claim”

– Organisation that doesn’t have an Information Manager.

“We can’t put data together about our customers from two parts of our organisation because it’s different”

– Organisation that thinks Data Management is IT.

“We get really inconsistent results between our most skilled staff”

– Organisation that doesn’t understand Knowledge Management.

Every day I work with some of the most talented people in the world. They are passionate, knowledgeable, qualified, committed professionals in the various fields that together we now call information governance.

They are also generally quite frustrated.

Frustrated that their organisation doesn’t treat what they do with the level of respect and gravity that it deserves, frustrated that what they have to offer isn’t being recognised, and frustrated that so much could be done to make things better, and isn’t being done.

I started this blog for three reasons –

1. I want records, information, data and knowledge managers to be the most empowered people in their organisations. Doors should open for them, business stakeholders should be fighting for their time.

2. If I’m going to be helpful in achieving that, I need to be better and clearer about my own understanding of information governance, what it is and why it’s important, and writing helps immeasurably – as do disagreements from people who know more than I do.

3. I learn a lot from some really smart people, and I’d love to share it.

I think there are a couple of issues for information governance professionals –

1. A belief by many that it’s all Information Technology.

2. A lack of clarity outside the disciplines about each discipline is, and what it has to offer.

3. Lack of an understood link between quality of information governance outcomes and organisational performance.

4. A lack of funding and personnel for all of these reasons.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to going on the journey with you, please disagree wherever you think I’m off track and tell me why. We will (I hope) all be better for it.

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Thinking about issues in Information and Records Management.

People

Records, Information, Complexity, People, Systems Find me on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlmelrose/