Making records management easier to fund

Getting funding in records management is not easy.

We are always competing with everything else that our organisation has to do - things that are often quite important.

But do we make it easy to fund records management?

Have we clearly connected the quality of our records to the quality of the results the organisation achieves?

Have we demonstrated how changing the quality of our records can change the quality of our results?

The largest challenge for records management is that it's mostly spoken about as something that we do so we can look backwards.

The overwhelming lesson of the last 20 years is that no one wants to fund that.

Until we fix this, records management is going to remain very difficult to fund.

It needs to be easy.

It needs to be about the future and the improvement in results that organisations can achieve.

We do have to approach this like serious professionals who want to do something with high certainty.

Hand wavey statements about "how much better things would be if only they'd let us show them what we can do" aren't going to get us there.

We are here because they don't believe we can make things better, and the proof has to come before "they" will let us.

We have to approach it more like business and financial analysts.

What's the process now?

What happens to it when we change the quality of the records?

What is the outcome on the costs and outcomes of the process?