How records has to compete.

There are four competitive horizons that I can think of -

1. Is our way of doing things effective - does it produce the results it's supposed to? How often - what's the percentage?

2. Do our practices produce results economically - are we spending $10 to solve 10c problems?

3. Is the market providing ways of achieving the same or better result more economically and effectively?

4. Is our practice easier for an executive or budget approver?

If our practice isn't effective, no one will fund it, and they'll fund anything else that they can. This is a serious challenge for us because most policy still says "this is the system of record" and 95% of the organisations records aren't in it.

Economically matters, and we've been losing to it for years. I've seen analysis about the "actual" storage costs by people trying to say records management practice is economical, but when you factor in the management time for a 3 stage disposition approval (and the percentage of the time you actually get to do it) we're spending $10 to destroy an object that an AWS S3 bucket could store for 237,000 years for about 30c.

For a really long time, we have ignored databases and business systems. Business systems present information in context, they're much better than documents in a significant number of circumstances - which is why they get more funding than we've ever had. This is the market delivering a better solution to our organisations in terms of its economic costs and value, and effectiveness.

There are two things you can give an executive - work to do, and something they can sign and move on with. Giving them things that they can sign off on rather than ongoing work they have to do is always going to be easier to get done.

Can you think of other horizons? What are they?