Evidentially focused information and records management doesn't create information assets - but we can.

The best analogy I’ve been able to come up with for evidential information (what we generally reduce records to), is that it’s keys for locks.

When we’re dealing with evidence of past transactions, each record is a key for a specific lock.

If we don’t want to open that specific lock, the key doesn’t have any value.

That’s a real problem if we want to talk about information assets.

While the definition of asset varies depending on which financial or accounting standard you look at, one thing they all agree on is that there is an expectation about value being produced in the future.

The problem for us, is that when the focus of our management activities is keys for locks that no one is ever expecting to open again, there’s no expectation of value in the future - so it’s not an asset.

That doesn’t mean that the evidential work doesn’t have value - it does.

It means we need to be very careful about how we talk about it, and how think about the path to achieving it.

When no one else thinks that information is going to be valuable in the future, talking about it like it’s an asset and it’s super valuable doesn’t make it an asset and super valuable, it makes us out of touch with the rest of the organisation. Being out of touch is the end of productive conversations with the rest of the organisation, and the end of our effectiveness because our work requires people to engage in specific patterns of behavior, and if they won’t listen to us, we can’t get them to change.

So what to do differently?

Personally, I’ve found it’s much more productive to focus on two areas - costs that can be avoided, and the meta-records that really are an asset.

There are always costs that can be avoided by more coherent and organised information. Most of the time, the costs aren’t visible to people because they’re just part of how they do things. Making those costs real - mostly the costs of finding information because people are storing it differently, or storing it in a format that makes it hard to use - can have a bigger impact on a desire to change information behaviour than any discussion about information assets ever will. ‘Information assets’ are too abstract, costs are abstract too - but they’re much less abstract, and mostly the costs we’re talking about are easy to remove - once a manager can see them.

Meta-records are real information assets. They’re all the information that’s about the events many records represent. Finding these is easy, all you have to do is go and find the non-transactional spreadsheets that your organisation produces. Almost invariably these represent information created to understand the state of the organisation at a point in time. They’re the management information - information for managers and people trying to organise work. Often they take huge amounts of effort to create, but managers want to do it because they’re keys for a door they want to open every single time they come into the office. They help them reduce the complexity of their work to something manageable, and let them stop trying to make sense of it all the time using working memory - something that is utterly impossible. What makes them valuable to us, is that automating their creation is a huge source of value, and generally requires really coherent transactional information.

The point underlying both of these areas, is that we’re not asking for behavioural change to create a key for a lock no one ever expects to open again. We’re asking people to change in ways that directly deliver value they care about - to create information that’s a direct asset to them.

There are real challenges to engaging in this type of work. First, we have to think about the end result we want in a slightly less direct manner, and that’s often unacceptable to our organisations - it’s not the role they expect us to play, and we need to renegotiate the role before we can play it. It’s also professionally difficult - we want to engage in best practices, and this delays the achievement of a best practice outcome, and creates a mid-step that’s not best-practice. Which means we’re delaying our own gratification when it feels better, faster and easier to just mandate the best practice - even if no one will do it. It also requires an endless amount of work to get to better, and leaves an endless amount of work un-done, which is very uncomfortable (and requires many meta-record/information assets/spreadsheets to manage coherently). So we need to renegotiate how we play our role with ourselves.

Personally though, I can’t see any other productive way to move forward.

We can keep talking about information that no one else thinks is an asset and stay disconnected from our organisations.

Or we can change our work so that it produces information that everyone thinks is an asset, and we might just get the support we need because there’s really something in it for everyone else.