How to remove archival compliance as a problem, and get adequate funding for your records program.

I think a dashboard illustrates the best way to show this.

Dashboards tell us what’s important to us, and our executive dashboards tell our executives what they are funding.

We have to be really careful what we show managers and executives, because it has to represent value that we’re delivering, or risk that we’re managing. Too often, we turn up and show executives dashboards full of metrics like record creation - which don’t represent value delivery or risk management, and actually represent work that we didn’t do.

If you want to solve archival compliance in your program, and actually get records management funded, the perfect dashboard (for me) looks something like what is below.

Performance measure 1 - something that a senior executive cares about and will fund.

Performance measure 2 - something that a senior executive cares about and will fund.

Performance measure 3 - something that a senior executive cares about and will fund.

Performance measure 4 - something that a senior executive cares about and will fund.

Performance measure 5 - something that a senior executive cares about and will fund.

Performance measure 6 - something that a senior executive cares about and will fund.

Performance measure 7 - something that a senior executive cares about and will fund.

Performance measure 8 - something that a senior executive cares about and will fund.

Performance measure 9 - something that a senior executive cares about and will fund.

Performance measure 10 - archival compliance.

Getting here could take several years, but the journey starts with a dashboard that measures a single thing that executives really care about.

To be clear, the way executives fund archival compliance tells us all about how much they value it - and the short summary is that (in my experience) they don’t care about it enough to fund it properly.

If you deliver nine other outcomes through records management that they really care about, you’ll get funded.

The problem we have, is that the typical practice pattern of records management is designed to deliver an archive of permanent value stuff.

This means that new sources of value need a new practice pattern.

You’re probably wondering where the bit is that we remove archival compliance as a problem.

Archival compliance is only a problem, because it is the sole focus of many programs, and it almost never gets funded adequately.

This leaves records teams unable to be effective in their organisations because they have been under-funded relative to the job the policy represents.

Without changes, either to the way archival regulation is implemented, archival regulation itself, or the way archives regulate, I cannot see a circumstance under which government organisations wake up tomorrow (or any tomorrow), and suddenly decide that they need to start giving records management more funding.

So the way to remove it as a problem, is to make it one measure in your dashboard.

When something is your only measure, and you’re failing to reach it, you’re a failure.

When something is one of five or ten measures, and you’re failing at it - it’s the troubled part of your program, or the opportunity to improve performance.

You’re a success.

And people like giving money and power to successful people.

And I think we'd all like to be more powerful and successful at work.

And when 95% of our work is funded properly, and we're successful, I'm sure that if we had (along the way) included a few more pieces of metadata (not enough to get in the way of the thing the executive cares about) to make the things that the archives care about easier, I'm sure that would be OK, and if we did it right, I'm sure no one else would even notice - other than maybe our archives, who might be surprised that someone was succeeding at implementing their regulatory framework.