Important questions about the practical maturity of records management.

A few questions as set up -

How long would it take your organisation to understand what it did yesterday?

How long would it take your organisation to understand the status of all work it needs to complete today?

What parts of your organisation do well answering these questions?

What parts of the organisation do badly?

If you could capture that information every day, what value would that have to understanding the state of the resourcing in your organisation, and how you planned and managed that resourcing into the future?

Who really needs that information?

The answer to the last question of course, is middle to senior managers who are making decisions about where to allocate funding.

What you'd find through this exercise, is that the parts of your organisation that do well will be the ones that have a business process management tool of some kind.

They'll know their processes, and they'll know the state of them - because the system is designed to report on that.

What this will tell you about the state of records management in your organisation is all about scope.

There are three follow up questions that I think are important, and that can tell us a lot about the practical maturity of records management - both as a discipline, and within our organisations.

Who owns those systems?

Are they records systems according to your records management policy?

Can large parts of the organisation tell you all about the work of the organisation using records without every touching a "records system?"