Managing record and archive quality in the right place.

Information asset management is all the rage at the moment.

We're co-opting the language of finance, to make clear that we think the organisation can expect future cash flows from the information we're capturing (expectation of future positive cash flows is the technical definition of an asset - and this can include savings).

The problem we have, is that mostly, what we're managing is of such low quality, that the cost of getting a business gain just isn't worth it.

This is for the simple reason that getting insight from records repositories often means finding specific information which is contained in 231 emails (most of which are duplicates filed by people on reply alls) or a set of word documents, none of which has a defined purpose or meaningful title.

I'm not sure that we as a profession can see the absurdity in suggesting our practices result in information assets when this is the type of "stuff" that we have.

This is because every profession has a professional culture, that culture becomes a way of seeing the world.

Our culture involves looking at that and saying that the way to improve the quality is to structure it so that we know the business activity and transaction that created it, and then to sentence it so we can destroy it at the same time.

It's sort of like saying that if we put all the rubbish in single waste management facility, we'll have a high quality asset - because buried in there somewhere are a heap of aluminium cans, and aluminium can be recycled endlessly without loss - so it's valuable.

Every routine business process comes down to a set of decisions that need to be made. We almost always know what those decisions are ahead of time, and if we ask experts in those areas, they can almost always tell us how they make the decision - what can be put into a nice decision tree, and what needs discretion - and what information they look for when they use their discretion.

About 3 years ago, China stopped taking plastic for recycling. Now every government on the planet is finding out that it doesn't matter how well you structure your waste pickups, if you're dealing with things that can't be recycled and you have nowhere to send them - you have a problem. The only place you can deal with the problem, is at the source by making sure that the waste isn't created.

The manufacturing industry learned this about 50 years ago when W Edwards Deming went to Japan and taught the Japanese about how quality works.

His insight was really simple, if you try and do quality at the end of the process, you spend more money addressing quality problems than you make out of what you fix.

Japanese manufacturers (particularly in the automotive sector) learned this lesson first - which is why they dominated global manufacturing for 40 years.

American manufacturers on the other hand, did quality at the end of the process - and ultimately we saw what happened to American car manufacturers in the 2000's - they went broke and needed to be bailed out.

Records management is currently in real need of a bail out for exactly the same reasons.

We are trying to manage quality at the end of the process.

People create whatever crap they want, email 50 people, write a 20 page document that should have been a one page memo, CC 30 people on an email socialising the decision they're about to make (so they can socialise the blame afterwards), and then they stuff it all into a records system - hopefully.

Then we come along and tell people that the difference between crap records and information assets is that we will put all of that garbage into an single system with a functional classification that lets us delete it in some period of time that no one other than an archive cares about.

And we can't see just how ridiculous that whole idea sounds - because professions become how we see the world.

Lots of the conversations I have in the industry include some kind of exhortation for someone to come and get people to "do the right thing," or one of fifty other exhortations for someone to tell everyone to do it the way we want it to.

The way we're doing it doesn't make sense.

That's why no one with authority will tell people to do it our way.

Our Japanese car industry, is data management.

In building business systems, they learned the simple lesson that if you constrain input - ie, specify the quality of information that people are allowed to add to the system - you never have to have a conversation about information assets, because people just know that they can't make any of the critical decisions of their job without the information that is readily available to them.

One of two things is going to happen in records.

Either we will learn this lesson, get involved at the start of business processes and specify quality up front.

Or we'll all find other jobs.

Regulatory capture will keep us around for a while - Chief Executives are very happy to spend money to tick a box if it gets a regulator of their back so that they can focus on things that are important to them.

I'm not really sure any of us want to be around for that reason though.

The strategic power of records is future facing applications, and it all starts with specifying information quality before a process starts.