How to make records management irrelevant to an organisation

There's only one context that matters.

What people rely on.

If no one will rely on it, it doesn’t make one iota of difference how well described it is, how compliant the repository is, or which god blessed the stone on which the holy EDRMS server rack stands.

Where did records management absolutely lose the plot?

We tried to tell people that structured data wasn't records (1960’s until 2018 as far as I can tell).

And then we tried to tell people that electronic documents weren't records (we learned faster here - as far as I can tell it was only about 1985 to 2010ish, depending on industry and location).

I still occasionally see people saying that something isn't a record until it has all its metadata (in the last 3 months, on social media).

How inane we must seem to business people, and anyone else with actual work to do.

We tried to tell them that the HR system, and the finance system, and the erp system - all the systems that provide the records they rely on to organise and manage their work and their business, we tried to tell them it's not records.

We think that makes what we do sound important.

They think it makes us sound very confused.

They go away thinking records mustn't be very important - if all the information that is most important to them isn't records, records must be something else.

And if something isn't important,

Why pay someone to manage it?