Language matters - Putting records and high quality business outcomes back together.

We have a series of language problems that are undermining our success.

To me, this is the highest priority for records management at the moment.

One such language problem is that we talk differently about problems caused by usage of records.

Business has to understand that records is about high quality business evidence, and high quality business evidence means processes that achieve their result. Failures are only "bad data" if the organisation correctly records the wrong thing.

Any other time, they're bad records.

This should include when processes fail because accessing information in a record is too slow because the quality level is inappropriate to the need (think of the paper record that is four days away for a process that needs to be executed in 2 hours).

This isn't complicated - business stakholders just don't understand what business evidence or records mean, and use different language to talk about the problems that they cause.

We tend to talk about the thing - "records" or "information" or "business evidence"

Business stakeholders tend to use phrases describing the problem for their process - "crap in, crap out," "bad data" - and many others, all to describe the impact of poor quality business evidence (records) being used as an input to a process.

That's the first language problem - we describe a thing, they describe a process problem.

The second language problem is that the idea of a record as an input to a process isn't something that business people think about.

It's data, or information. To them it's not “the record created by the first point of contact with the organisation” - which means that they don't connect the problem with needing to engage us to fix it.

This comes from two places that I think are worth exploring.

The first is the reluctance of the records profession to talk about records.

It's crept in over the last 10 years and now people don't know what it is, and don't connect it to the problems that they need to solve. We have to fix this, if we won't embed the concepts and importance of what we do in people's minds - no one will, and our profession will die.

The second is that mostly we haven't embraced the idea of capturing and organising information so that it can be used efficiently in many parts of the organisation.

We still largely think about records as things, and our job as being done once the things are captured.

This is a problem - because our organisations are hungry for people who think about the totality business processes, where the "data" (records) that feeds those processes comes from, and how risks to the process can be managed through records practice.

It's one of the things that the ISO15489 committee chose to do with their 2016 standard update by embedding a non-archive focused idea about appraisal in section 7 - to embed the idea that appraisal is about business risks of all types that can be mitigated with records practice - and impacts to later processes must be considered.

There is actually a race here (one that we are losing) - the race between data and records.

Data people start with an assumption that the data they are capturing will need to be used in many places - and we don't.

These are problems that we must fix, and they start with language.

The great thing for us is that organisations really are hungry for records to be everything it is supposed to be.

We will know we are winning again when senior executives come to us and say that processes are failing because the records they rely on are poor.

Until then, we have to take responsibility for putting records and high quality business outcomes back together.