Are we credible and efficient suppliers of records service and how can we know?

Our organisations want us to be two things.

Efficient

And Credible.

If we are those two things, the only thing limiting what we can ask for is likely to be what we feel we can drive value out of.

Efficiency is relatively easy.

Develop a service catalog - or some other menu-like thing that makes the scope of what we do legible to our organisations and the market. The closer the service items are to things already available - the easier this will be.

Then you take it out into the marketplace and you ask vendors to give you a cost to deliver the same service.

If you cost less than what the market tells you the service should cost, you're reasonably close, or justifiably more expensive - you're an efficient supplier of service.

Then when someone tells you that records is too expensive in your organisation, you can tell them to go away.

Or at least, you can have a a real conversation with your organisation about whether they value the service items you provide.

Credible is harder, and some of it will be out of your control.

Credibility is about having a history of saying "I'm going to do this" - and then you do it, and it works.

It's also about choosing goals that your organisation can understand, believe in and support.

Because if you keep doing things that your organisation doesn't understand, believe in, and support, they will never find your credible, and never understand you.

The bit that you can't control, is that we are often tarred with the same brush as past people in our role.

Records is difficult for a lot of people at the moment, because past people in the role have supported goals that the rest of the organisation don't understand, and can't make sense of. A lot of this comes from paper ideas in an digital world.

Digging out of it is just like digging anything else - you do it one spade at a time.

Choose goals that your organisation can understand spending money on.

Deliver on your actions towards those goals effectively.

And you're credible.

The way you know you are credible and efficient comes from how your organisation treats you.

If you've got a seat at the table.

If executives listen when you talk.

If they won't buy a business system without asking you how.

If they engaged you to understand how they should roll out Microsoft 365, and gave you the governance tools and processes you needed.

If they didn't fight you on the budget for change management for your last project.

If they gave you enough money to hire a BA so you could have your last system designed properly.

If there's always budget for integrations.

Then they're showing you that they see you as credible and efficient.