Measuring effectiveness of records management information architecture, and the limits to effectiveness

To me, the key measure of effectiveness is how far down your hierarchy you can go before you stop being able to summarise what you’re seeing with a pattern.

The reason we like functional arrangement, is that if we could ever get anyone to use it, we could summarise everything that is relevant to us with a single pattern.

The ability to summarise information architecture actually tells us a lot about the maturity of an organisation and the work it does. High maturity organisations that don’t change very much have structure that is easy to summarise. Low maturity organisations, or those whose business activities change frequently are much more difficult to summarise - because every individual has their own transaction pattern, and they have three for last week - so the patterns of arrangement sprawl until were not sure what is pattern, and what is just noise.

This is also the limit to effectiveness - the arrangement of information will never be more mature than the maturity of the processes it represents. People who turn up every day and wing it, will inevitably wing their information architecture too. This means that there is always a leader-follower tension in information architecture - a really good manager can lead the information architecture, pressing their team forward into more mature ways of working, that result in more routine and summarisable patterns of information. A really good information architect can also lead a team into more mature processes by helping them structure the information that supports their work in more routine ways.

This does mean that information architecture can be a lens on the maturity of records management. This is a place that I think we tend to go horrifically wrong. We think about it in terms of some model of records management that we have in our head - which is inevitably built on the visible instruments of records management, rather than how effectively people are managing their records. Put it like this - policy is a nice leading indicator that may convert to some kind of maturity, as is a nominated senior officer, but I would argue that the ability to summarise is a far better measure of maturity. A simple example of that - if lifecycle management was the only goal, the best measure of maturity is how much of your data you can summarise with a single pattern - transaction, classification, disposal date. If you can give me that pattern for 10% of your data - I think that single number tells us more actual maturity, than any amount of policies, people and expenditure.

I think this idea of summarisation also points to one of the largest leverage points that we routinely neglect - which is managers. Through one lens, the basic job of most management is to create summaries of what their team is doing or what they should be doing so that everyone is clear about what they should be working on, and the manager can maintain some awareness of how progress is being made. Effective information architectures bake this in - because when the structure of information drives management work, management police the structure because the ability to summarise doesn’t just tell us how good the architecture is, it tells everyone else how mature our work is, and how competent we are.

The caveat that we all have to hold in mind, is that a summary for one person’s work doesn’t summarise the work of another person, functional arrangement - while a nice idea, is designed to make our work easy to summarise with a pattern. It’s not designed to make it easy to summarise the work of other people - which is why it routinely fails to be used by them. The magic of information architecture is finding ways to structure information that can be meaningfully summarised in ways that support the work of many groups.