Reactive and Proactive records and how much of what gets recorded is actually valuable?

Two perspectives on how to do records.

The way we do it now, is almost entirely reactive (perspective 1).

We treat the quality and quantity of the records being created as something that's fixed and unchangeable.

We do this because we mistakenly believe that we can't get involved in the creation of records - that's "not our job" or it's "the business's responsibility" (somehow pretending that we're not part of "the business") - or some other utterly ridiculous excuse.

So we wait.

We wait for people to create low quality records in absolutely vast quantities, and then we beg for the resources so that we can harangue them to put the records somewhere "compliant" so that we can spend/waste more resources describing their low quality and vast quantity.

But what percentage of the information contained in that high quantity of garbage is actually important?

10%?

5?

2?

What if we were proactive (this is perspective 2)

What if we got in front of the business process, and used a model like DIKAR (Data, Information, Knowledge, Actions, Results) to understand what information was actually worth recording, and helped them find a way to record that information - and nothing else.

Helped them get rid of the 50 ancillary emails asking questions by replacing them with a single FAQ or knowledge base in one place.

Helped them remove the tenth time we'd asked someone to provide details, or fill out a form with information that is already in our records.

What if we helped make the process better by using the skills and information literacy that are our towering area of expertise?

Personally, I think we'd get everything we want - high quality records, people falling over themselves to ask for our help, more budget than we've ever asked for, and we'd need less of it than ever before.

So in this way of looking at records, there are two ways to do it - reactive and proactive.

Reactive records is an acceptance that the quality and quantity of what we have to deal with is determined by other people - which means that almost everything about how we do our job is going to be determined by other people.

That's a storm that I don't think any of us want to weather much, it's got us where we are.

Proactive records is a taking of responsibility for our own destiny.

It's a decision to be the storm.