Records compliance standards vs what really happens and what gets lost in the process

There are compliance standards, and then there's what happens in the real world.

Compliance standards say things like "anything you use is a record" and "must be kept in an approved records system" - and yet we know that only small percentages of records ever make it into an approved records system.

In practice, we know that’s laughable, and has been for 20 years.

The reason is simple - to say that some of the records standards we work with are unrealistic is a huge understatement.

The impact of this is huge.

People spend their whole lives and huge amounts of energy pushing their organisation to do something that the organisation just sees no need to do, and no gain in doing.

It's a tragedy of epic proportions, because all that time and energy could be spent on working with them to raise the quality of the records that they create and work with every day.

It puts everyone in an awful position.

On one hand, wehave regulation to implement - even if no one will ever show up to enforce it, and their organisations don't want it.

On the other hand, the gains we could be helping our organisations make are huge.

Records are truly the currency of most of our organisations and a core determinant of how well we deliver meaningfully to our publics.

So the choice is generally to deliver the compliance standard, or deliver the public good - and live with the anxiety that one day we could be called out for building, using and recommending ways of working that fail to tick all the boxes.

How are you dealing with it?