Changing the expectation about records.

I was at a conference recently, and one of the participants was talking about the reactions they got when they told people on the bus they worked in records.

In a nutshell - the people were bored and uninterested.

The same person expressed the sentiment that when they told people they worked in data management - people were interested in understanding what they did.

Their job didn't change, just the label they gave to it.

The question from them was about whether they should change their title, and start talking about working with data rather than records.

It's a fair question.

Sometimes the best way to get people to buy in, is to change the label you give to something.

This is because expectations about how a business unit performs its duties, and what it does are social creations.

As much as people in top management would like to think that their policy and org charts, formal relationships etc. mean something - if they fail to gain social license through people actually acting like those things are real in their peer interactions, they mean nothing.

This is also the core of what it means to change a label.

Changing a label is a signal to the organisation that "things are different."

If things are different - that's great, you've just given people a signal that they should expect something different and they will become open to changing their opinion about your services, and what you deliver.

If you violate that expectation though, people's expectation just shifts to one in which they know that they can't trust you when you tell them things are different.

I've seen this work both well, and badly.

I remember having one person in an organisation tell me very excitedly that they were going to stop doing records management, and start doing information management - and how excited the organisation was about that. They then went on to describe a program in which they would implement and manage a set of policy and systems to manage the recording-of/recorded information in the organisation.

To me, nothing they said clashed with what I thought was good records management, for them though, the change of label was critical to getting people to become open to the change.

If they'd just continued with the same set of practices under a different label though, I think the organisation would have rejected "information management" just as strongly as it rejected "records management."

The change in label for that organisation also included a genuine change in the focus of records services, and how they were delivered. They shifted their focus from something that the organisation had said very clearly it didn't care about (archival regulation), to something that the whole organisation from the executive to the front line cared very deeply about - the challenge of needing to be accountable for coronial inquests - which are a fact of life for this organisation.

On the other hand, I've seen people change the labels on records plenty of times - and just burn the new label. I've seen it go from records to information management, information services, knowledge management and others - and 12 months on, the excitement about change is gone, distrust is higher.

I understand the psychology of it - we think that because we like records, other people will like it if they just give it a chance.

In practice though, they've given it a chance plenty of times, and found that they didn't want what it was delivering - so all the label change represents for them is an increase in their time wasted on records.

Personally, I think this is a crossroads for records.

If we can't get what we're doing funded or engaged with in our organisations, changing the label won't help.

The only changes that help are focus and practice.

Focus on helping people with new things, and delivering practice in different ways.

Once practice and the focus of practice have changed - re-labelling it so that the new service can be marketed to the organisation differently can accelerate the uptake of the new service - if it's delivering what people want.

Who knows, change the focus of the service and its practices, you might not even have to change the label.

If it helps people, records might start to be something that people want, and are interested in.

Or we could just change the label - and after a long, hard, unrewarding day, people on the bus might find us interesting - and that’s nice.