Building records management around reliable things that people want
A friend once shared a quote with me that he attributed to Paul Keating. It went ‘in a two horse race, always back self interest because at least you know it’s trying’.
The reality of records management, is that there are reliable drivers of quality, and unreliable drivers of quality. The most reliable driver of quality is the value of the information in a record to inform the next stage in a business process.
I’m continually told by people that records management is about accountability.
That is why it’s dying.
Accountability is an unreliable value stream.
People only want it when things go wrong, and when they do, they want it so that they can blame someone else for something that went wrong (“accountability” = not me).
How much do we think people will invest in that?
Consider going to a manager and asking them to spend $100k. Two options - first, ‘improved results by improving the quality of records’ and second, ‘improved accountability by improving the quality of records’. Which one of these do you think they would choose?
The answer of course, is ‘it depends’.
It depends on how often managers have performance problems vs. how often they have accountability problems.
If you’ve ever managed anything, you’d know that very occasionally, you have accountability problems, you ALWAYS have performance problems - there’s never enough money, and everyone always wants better results.
One is reliable, the other is unreliable.
There is another dimension of reliability too.
Which one of those investments do you think is most likely to produce better accountability?
The answer is (of course) the investment in accountability.
The problem though, is that you might get that investment 1 time in 100 that you ask.
The other 99 times, the money goes to the person promising performance improvement.
And realistically, if you improve the quality of records so that performance improves, do you think the ability of the organisation to account for actions taken goes up, or down?
UP - almost certainly.
So if you want better records, so you can have better accountability, are you better off asking for the reliable investment, or the unreliable investment?
To me, it has always seemed that asking for an investment in performance has been a more reliable producer of accountability, than asking for an investment in accountability.
There are always two aspects to the value of a record. One is as information for a known purpose, and known person, the other is as evidence for an unknown person, unknown process, and unknown point in the future. One of those is reliable, the other isn’t. People want one of them, and not the other. One improves accountability all the time, the other improves it a small percentage of the time.
You can build records management around many things, but if you have to pick one, performance is always the self interested horse, and if it’s creating records, accountability goes up with it.
