High quality information environments and records management

The thing that every organisation wants, is a high quality information environment.

That’s one in which the right information is available to the right people at the right time and the right level of quality.

The problem for records practice, is that we act like we’ve achieved that if we’ve captured the record of a transaction.

What this ends up with is people playing detective.

They probably know the information they need is available - if only the know enough about the activities of their organisation to understand which other activities MIGHT have captured that information.

We talk about findability like it’s meaningful - ignoring completely that making something “findable” puts the work of funding squarely on the information user.

What I think we need to start considering is a concept that we might call “presentability” - how presentable is this information.

If we have (as good continuum records people) considered all future uses of information that’s being recorded, can we easily present that information to the people who need it? Or are we making them do the work of finding it.

To me, the test of this is that we have to be able to definitively answer a negative - “do we have this information?”

The reason is relatively simple - if we can answer that question, we prevent someone spending time looking for it.

If we can’t answer that question, people will spend a while looking, and then they’ll realise that they can put the load back onto whoever is their “customer” in the transaction - and just ask for the information again.

Which is just starting to the “capture” circle all over again.

I haven’t seen a lot of appetite in most records practitioners for working on the presentation of information. It’s generally put in the too hard basket.

I’ve also never seen a high quality information environment in which someone hasn’t spent significant time and energy understanding how the information needs to be presented so that it can be consumed efficiently - ie. given to people at the right level of quality for their need.

Everywhere I go, records teams focusing on capture are struggling for funding.

I have never seen someone struggling for funding when the focus is a high quality information environment.

Which means two things.

The first, is that focusing on how recorded information will be presented to people takes more effort.

The second is that organisations are extremely happy to pay for it.

Which means that there’s a good effort-reward relationship.

As opposed to capture focused records - where the relationship poor if not downright abusive.

We should do the thing that has a good effort-reward relationship.