Records and management - what's important, and what it's for.

There's an unfortunate and persistent belief in the records management field, that organisations hire records managers to manage records.

They don't.

What they do, is identify areas that are holding back the performance of the organisation, or that could enhance it, then they work out what skills they think are necessary to address those problems - and go and hire someone. and hire someone with skills to address those problems.

In short, they hire records managers for exactly the same reason that they hire people into any role in the organisation.

This means that every single time one of us is hired, there's an expectation that organisational performance is going to go up as a result of hiring us.

Where does this leave us with compliance objectives?

Somehow, in records management we've decided that performance and compliance are different things.

Performance against compliance objectives can be just as important as other measures.

There's a bank in Australia that got fined $785 Million by AUSTRAC for non-compliance recently.

Just think for a moment about how much drag the loss of $785 Million causes on a business?

No one in that organisation is having trouble making a case that records for compliance improves performance.

Where this gets murky, is that there are a lot of regulators where the cost benefit isn't so clear.

This is because those regulators aren't competent.

They don't understand the game that they're playing,

Or possibly they do - and the politics mean that they can't take the enforcement actions that would make their regulatory framework meaningful.

Which doesn't change the fact that an unenforced regulation doesn't get taken seriously and implemented properly by the organisations that are subject to it.

This just means that it never gets the funding that it needs to actually succeed - and senior executives are allocators of funding, its basically all they do, and where they allocate it provides proof of what they see as important.

This leaves many records teams in an place where they have a decision to make about what performance to focus on.

My personal view, is that in many organisations, regulation (and particularly archival regulation) has been enough to get records teams employed, but the lack of enforcement activity means that it's never going to get them the funding they need to adequately perform against the compliance objective.

This does leave a choice about how to address the fact that being on the hook for an unachievable task does nothing but generate masses of anxiety and guilt.

The choice that I think most of us are making now (and probably sub-consciously), is that we've become impervious to discussions about performance.

We've adopted a defence in which we pretend that discussions about performance don't belong in discussions about records.

Which makes no sense - right from the beginning, records has been all about enabling performance beyond the capacity of memory, and beyond our ability to trust one another without evidence.

And I think that's the choice.

Continue to engage in the sisyphean task that records has become in many organisations.

Or focus on operational performance, build business cases, and make records the centre of excellence, the place that everyone goes to improve their performance.

Because that's what records was all about.

Long before archives got involved and there were ISO standards, there were people figuring out how to use recorded information to push the performance of people working together further than memory could go.

That’s what records was.

It’s what records could be.

And ultimately, it’s what organisations are looking for when they hire us.