How to make sure your work is appreciated and used in information and records management

There is a symbiotic relationship between information managers and information creators and users.

It's like the difference between coaches for elite athletes, and people who are just starting.

For the elite athlete, the quality of everything matters, and only a high performance coach will do.

For the people just starting, anything that gets them off the couch will do - they just need to start, and anyone who can get that done will do.

There's a neat parallel here.

When your organisation is full of people who are simple consumers of information, any information manager will do.

When they're sophisticated consumers of information, they need a high performance information manager.

This is where many information management programs go wrong.

They prescribe a high maturity approach to information management, to a low maturity group of consumers.

This leads to the predictable problem that we see all the time - high maturity systems have been built, and everyone is working somewhere else.

Some people will call building a high maturity system a great piece of work.

The problem is that every time I meet someone who has done it this way, they're unhappy.

They feel unappreciated.

No one is using the great things that they've built.

They spend all their time waving their stick and complaining that no one will enforce.

The root cause of this is a failure to realise that a great relationship is symbiotic, and there are only really two good options that result in work that gets appreciated.

Do work at the level of the user group that you have.

Teach the user group you have to ask for the level of work that you want to do.

Most people have never worked in a high quality information environment.

Most people, once they've been shown what it looks like, can't go back.

They just need someone to show them.