Dealing with the responsibility problem in records management

If you've ever looked a the quality of records from a project that has a document controller on it, you should have been impressed - I know I have been frequently.

Beautifully arranged, perfectly titled, complete.

Records that really are capable of telling the story, saving our behinds, and helping us spot anything untoward.

Obviously, this happens because there's a single person, and they're responsible for the quality of the records/documents.

It makes me wonder.

Who is responsible for the records of a specific, end-to-end process in your organisation?

If you're like most of the organisations I work with, everyone is responsible for recordkeeping.

I think this leaves two factors at play that stymie recordkeeping objectives.

The first is the standard diffusion of responsibility. Diffusion of responsibility is a phenomenon that occurs when groups of people are witnessing anything. Basically, you’d think that if there were a large number of people present with a job to do, it would be more likely to get done - but likelihood actually goes down. It’s driven by the assumption that someone else will do it.

The second is the tendency of bureaucratic organisations to socialise decision making as a way of socialising accountability. Meaning of course, that accountability for recordkeeping is also socialised, but unlike the decision - without which an action cannot take place, the records work likely doesn’t stop anyone moving something forward.

It makes me wonder how many of the problems we deal with are a result of not making a single person explicitly responsible for a complete record of each activity.