How to get your CFO and CEO to support your records management program
The answer to this is simple to say, difficult to agree on, and missing from every program I've ever seen.
The way to get your CFO and CEO on board is to have an agreed valuation model for the information that you're holding.
The only people who can agree to a valuation model in a way that will have any power in the organisation are likely to be your CEO and CFO (or their equivalents).
There is so much talk in our industry about "life blood," "new oil" - and how the organisations can't live without us.
The cost of blood is $210USD per unit.
The cost of crude oil today is $82.21USD per barrel.
The cost of bad information and records management practice in your organisation is......
A series of hand wavey analogies to blood and oil ($292.21?).
If the cost of losing a record was $85, we'd treat it like it was worth $85. We’d know the value of a box holding 100 records was $8500 - so storing it might actually make financial sense.
Our finance teams would go after it like they go after the missing $9.00 on your credit card statement that you’re sure you didn’t spend.
We could send managers the bill for losing records, or mis-filing them and actually have them take it seriously - because the valuation was agreed to by the CEO and CFO.
Valuation models are also wonderful in that there is no one way to value information that's going to make sense for everyone.
Replacement cost of the information will make sense for some institutions.
Some form of productivity metric or sale value will make sense for others.
Some measure of enduring historical value, or the reputational value of the organisation and how that will impact its ability to operate.
We can also show that some information is an asset, some is a liability, and work on projects based on their ability to improve the value of the information asset.
This is because context matters.
A record captured in a system that lets us deliver it automatically to a customer service representative that needs it has a higher value than one stored two days away.
At root, this is an information governance issue.
Governance is always about the allocation of decision making power in an organisation.
At the moment, no one is making a decision about the value of the information in their organisation in a financially meaningful way.
So how can we be surprised when we're treated as a cost with no value, and our budgets are continually reduced?
Blood and oil are not priced according to valuation models. They are traded on a market, which defines their price. You can build models to establish their value but such models are as a result of the buying and selling (the demand and the supply), not the cause of it.
The obvious lesson for records managers here is to attempt to sell the company's records and then see if anyone wants to buy them.