Being very careful making promises about the value of records management.

There are lots of assertions about the value of records management thrown around in records management circles. Mostly, they're untrue. Buying into them without understanding how far beyond records management practice we have to go to deliver them really hurts our credibility in our organisations, and if we can't be credible about the value we can deliver, no one will trust us when we start to assert that we can deliver incredible value.

And as many of you who read this will know, I think we can deliver incredible value to our organisations - if only we recognise what records and our records management practice pattern are actually able to deliver so that we can answer the HOW question credibly when we are called on to answer it. If we can't answer the HOW question credibly, and we don't answer it proactively (ie. we should be making the assertion and then saying HOW it is delivered), our organisations will see us just like they see every other sales person who promises a continent and delivers just enough ground for our shoes to cover.

TO me, we need to be clear about the value of records and records management, and know what's necessary beyond that to deliver an outcome.

In a nutshell, record-making is a general purpose capability that has some sources of inherent and irreducible value. Records management is a set of processes that should (big should) enhance specific aspects of value production by introducing management activities to records.

The inherent and irreducible value of records is actually best founded in psychology. It is that it allows us to work beyond the limits of our memory. The number one limitation to people's ability to do detailed work of any kind is our working memory. Specifically that it has VERY limited capacity, it decays very quickly (ie. we forget), and it's not very accurate. So we can't remember very much, for very long, with much accuracy - which means that we can't do work that requires us to accurately remember very much for very long - unless we have something that lets us remember a lot of things, for a long time with a high degree of accuracy. This is the inherent and irreducible value of records.

The specific value of records management practice, the way it is designed now, is based on economics (ie. production, distribution and consumption). The first source of value of traditional records management practice is founded in the economics of finding specific information when it is stored on paper, the second is costs of storing records (again, when they are on paper).

The first source of value of records management solves the simple problem that our limited memory means that very quickly, we can't remember what we created and where we put it, and we often have to rely on things that other people created. So we catalogue and describe our records, and then we have a system for storing them. All of this reduces the amount of reliance on our ability to remember where things are. This is a core economic problem for paper records, because the only way to find a lost paper record, is to have people go and look at large volumes of paper records, and the only way to establish that we don't have a record (in the absence of a catalogue) is to read everything.

The second source of value is storage cost economics, and the temptation to destroy that storage cost creates. If you go back and read the pre-history of many government archives, you'll find many references to the expense of storing records in city office space being out of control, and where it was under control, records had sometimes been destroyed that were then required later (the Public Record Office of Victoria in particular has a really nice document that describes the lead-up to its founding). Establishing a group of people who can store records in a cheaper space, who will use an understood catalogueing and management system, and who will be responsible for a business process that destroys records after a collectively understood time period that we agree represents the end of their useful life - is a great way to improve the economics of storing large volumes of paper records.

Of course, the moment someone invented the fileserver and the electronic document, this became very different - we automatically got a catalogue of the records in the form of the directory structure. Then search became a main stream capability, and we no longer had to read everything to find something with an acceptable degree of reliability. The cost of storing a document plummeted, and a combination of the new cost structure and legislation made it risky to delete things - so now of course, we keep everything for much longer.

All this is a preamble to saying that when people tell me that records management is about accountability, compliance, find-ability, knowledge preservation, operational efficiency etc. it makes me question whether they understand what they do every day, because those aren't things that records deliver as part of their inherent and irreducible value, and they are not things that the general pattern of records management (functional description with retention management) was designed to deliver.

This is something that we all need to recognise when we make assertions about the value of records management.

If we make promises that are outside of it's inherent and irreducible value, or what the records management practice pattern in our organisation was designed to deliver, we're making assertions that are unlikely to be believed. People who hear these things experience a moment of what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" - meaning (in this case) that we make an assertion about reality that doesn't match up with their experience of reality, and they experience a moment of discomfort as they hear our assertion of reality that doesn't match up with their experience of it.

So their first thought is likely to be "no it doesn't."

And their second thought (if we're lucky, and they don't just stop at the first thought, and stop talking to us altogether) is likely to be "HOW?"

ie. HOW does records management deliver accountability? All you do is catalogue our records and manage their lifecycles. How does that deliver on accountability?

The short answer, is that it doesn't - because it's not part of the inherent and irreducible value of records, and it isn't what records management practice was designed to deliver.

MBA's (probably half your management team) generally get a basic education in logic as part of their study. They're forced to consider ideas about "necessary and sufficient." As an example, are records and records management necessary and sufficient for accountability?

You'll likely want to say yes, because you work in records, and it has probably been drilled into you that this is what records management does.

The answer is NO.

If you want to hold an apprentice carpenter accountable for hammering a nail in correctly, you watch them hammer a nail in, and then go and hold them accountable for it. The necessary and sufficient conditions are knowledge about the proper way to hammer a nail in, and a process for accountability (commitment to watching them do it, ok, you must also have an apprentice to watch).

No records necessary there. Not one.

If you want to hold someone who owns a factory accountable for meeting occupational health and safety requirements, you go and inspect their factory.

Are records and records management necessary for this to happen?

No - they really aren't.

What you actually need, is a person with sufficient authority to inspect the factory and tell people what to do. Before we had records or records management, we would do this with armies, and criminal organisations have historically done it with the threat of violence.

In a democratic, rule of law system, the process is enhanced by records of legislation - a record of what the parliament said the law was. It is also enhanced by having a records of regulation - what the regulator said needed to be in place. At some point, an inspector could enhance the process by identifying themselves using records, and enhance the process by issuing a record about the inspection.

The point is, that accountability in both of these situations is achievable without any records. It's impractical, but achievable - because accountability is absolutely nothing to do with records. It is a commitment to hold to account about commitments - a commitment that needs to be made and carried out by people who are interested in ensuring that what was committed to, is what was done.

It's a people thing.

And where was records management in either of these hypotheticals?

Nowhere.

It didn't produce an iota of accountability.

So when we say that Records Management delivers accountability, managers just assume that we came down in the last rain shower because they've been holding people to account all day, and records management hasn't been involved.

But records probably have - even if they weren't really aware of it.

This is because they understand something about records that many of us don't, without ever having to be told.

They know that records are a tool that has certain inherent and irreducible value, that (like any other tool) can be used to increase efficiency and effectiveness - but that's all, they are value neutral tools that produce zero value without people doing work with them.

They also know that records management is generally the thing they fund because the process is designed to achieve compliance with their archive's policy - this happens because the legislation and policy were designed with the outcomes noted above in mind, and that's what the practice pattern reflects.

They know that if they want to deliver accountability in their organisation, they need (first) a group of people committed to accountability as a principle, then they need a business process that delivers it. They will create and use records during this process because of the inherent and irreducible value of records. At some point, if there is a retention requirement for the records they produce, records management may help them deliver on this tiny little part of the much larger project and program of change that they will have to deliver for their "enhanced accountability program."

The question we should keep in mind when we make any assertion outside of retention management for records management, is how do we figure out when we're on shaky ground with an assertion, vs. solid ground.

I think this is simple, we need to remember that records management was designed to solve a specific problem, and think about whether we are talking about that specific problem.

If we're not, this doesn't mean that we can't deliver it.

It means that we're likely to have a significant gap between what we're doing, and what we're promising.

And we have to recognise that our audience are likely to be experiencing some form of cognitive dissonance created by their gap.

So we need to have a plan that articulates "HOW," and we need to make the articulation of that plan part of the assertion.

Or they won't trust us.

What do you think?

What else do you think it is safe to assert about the value of records management?