Records Management as professional management, and what that means.

ISO standards refer to Records Management as a ‘field of management’ and the late, great, Peter Drucker referred to management as ‘the organ of society responsible for making economic resources productive.’

What I think we have to recognise in this, is that we are responsible for making economic resources productive, and our specialised knowledge and skills mean that the way we do that is through systematic practices around records.

Where I think we go wrong in reference to the definition, is in thinking it gives us some form of exclusivity in terms of those activities, we treat quality as boolean - so we end up thinking of records management as something that can only be done by us, or as something where there is a right way, or a wrong way.

If we look at the activities ascribed to records management, it should be pretty clear that we aren’t the only group that can do those things. To me, this means that when it comes to the economic resource we call records, there is a spectrum of quality available to the organisation in relation to how efficiently it can achieve results. To me, it looks something like the diagram below. The implication in the model should be pretty clear - records management activities can be performed by either professionals or non-professionals, what is on offer by hiring us, is a zone of performance that can’t be reached without specialist professionals.