Minimising vs managing records

Ultimately, we have to serve our organisations.

But there's one thing that I keep coming back to as the core problem, over and over again.

The simple problem that we just have too much information in our organisations, and despite the fact that some of us are "information managers" now, we're only managing the recorded information - the records.

So here's a goal that I think we should be striving for this year - reducing the number of records in our organisation until we are at the minimum possible to maintain the quality.

For me, this means that for every transaction, we'd ideally have two objects.

The first is the comprehensive record - literally everything.

The second is the summary - the relevent information that we have identified gets used to understand the current status of the transaction, and make 90% or more of the decisions about the case.

Wouldn't that simplify your records practice?

Wouldn't that simplify your organisations business practices?

Here's the catch though.

The problem of too much information doesn't stop by efficiently and systematically capturing, controlling and destroying whatever gets created.

If we keep doing records as something that happens after someone else records whatever they want to in their 40 cloud services, we won't make a dent.

If we keep doing records as something that happens one at a time, we will continue to no even scratch the surface - because we just can't justify enough resources to do it that way.

If we keep doing records as a thing where we write a policy and take no responsibility for its performance - we won't get taken seriously.

What can work though, is working on the supply of records.

Because they don't all need to be created.

When left to their own devices, and given no guidance, people are TERRIBLE recorders.

And they don't know they need help because by and large, no one has ever shown them that there's a better way.

If we sit down with people, identify the informational needs for a transaction, the ones that drive performance (ie. we use DIKAR) and work with them to deliver those as efficiently as possible (ie. through the smallest number of tools and objects) - we might have a chance.

Personally, I think records will start to really win again when organisations being well served by records start to say things like "information overload, what information overload?"