A question to ask yourself before you implement records management "best practice"

Where is the evidence base that it is effective?

This doesn't mean "are there lots of people doing it?"

It doesn't mean "is there someone who has been practicing longer than me who says "do it this way.""

This means "is there evidence that implementing this practice has caused high levels of effectiveness when measured against what the policy says was being aimed at?"

We have huge numbers of people implementing "best practice" "compliant" systems and refusing to implement anything else, or consider it a records system.

And those systems are often capturing a very low percentage of what the records policy says they should be.

Basically, the implemented "best practice" is failing to deliver the policy objectives it's supposed to.

And we keep doing it.

And telling other people to do it that way.

Take retention focused classification schemes.

Ordinary people don't know what to do with them.

So they respond in one of two ways -

1. They do something that "makes sense to them" - which means they put things in places that they don't belong.

2. They don't put it in the system - they "do it later" (never happens) or put it somewhere they understand (ie. not structured for retention).

We have good evidence for a very high failure rate of retention focused classification schemes.

It's in disposition practices.

Almost no one will destroy anything without going back and appraising it at the content level first.

This is because the retention focused classification scheme doesn't work - and we know it doesn't work.

Yet it's best practice.

Why?

Because 20 years ago when recordkeeping was custodial, all our records were managed by people whose sole job was to manage the records.

So we built classification schemes on the expectation that there would be an appraisal process by a professional before we put something in it.

The world has changed.

Lots of what was best practice now doesn't produce results.

So we need a better dialogue around what best practice actually is.