Records Management or managing the records?

Why do we have managers?

The alternative is that people self organise around a purpose - which definitely can and does work.

Employing a manager is something that an organisation does when it believes that performance can be improved by hiring someone whose specific job is to improve organisational performance by getting a specific thing to perform better - generally by coordinating the actions of a group of people.

The thesis is that if the thing performs better, the organisation will perform better.

Once upon a time, I think organisations hired us to manage the records.

Once upon a time, they knew that having the records managed would result in an improvement in organisational performance.

Probably because the impact of losing a record was having to get a person to open and read the contents of however many yrnd og thousands of files constituted the company archive.

The cost of finding a single poorly catalogued record could be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now the impact of losing a record is a series of searches.

Yes - it takes time.

It doesn't take weeks, months or years.

So the game has changed because the economics of finding have.

Now, Records Management is a field of management that needs to be delivering an organisational performance improvement by doing more than just managing the records.

This isn't news.

Even the 2001 version of ISO15489 asked us to plan the information needs of the organisation - an activity that fundamentally said we couldn't just manage the records at the end of the process, we had to get in front of it and work out what information the organisation needed.

Has Records Management changed?

Or are we still just managing the records?