Records management standing on its own

To me, great records management is about how we improve the ability of our organisations to improve results through records management practice.

This means that improved performance is a first order effect of records management.

When we think about it like this, I think records management is something that can stand on its own. The central issue is performance, and we draw a straight line to how records management improves it.

Something that has always concerned me is records management as a compliance function (and being clear, I mean regulatory compliance, not compliance with our own policies).

Any type of compliance activity has to be a cost-benefit exercise. The cost is whatever the compliance implementation and enforcement costs, the benefit is any gain in performance that we get, or removal of something that might impact our performance - fines, sanctions etc.

If the compliance implementation won't produce gains that are greater than the costs, we should be telling our organisation to pay the fines, or endure the sanctions.

That's the nature of cost-benefit analysis.

When we say "records management is about compliance," we are saying "compliance has value, and records management is how we achieve it." It's not the same thing as saying "records management has value independent of our desire to achieve compliance."

It paints records management as something for which performance improvement is only ever a second order effect.

The problem of being a second order solution is that when an organisation decides that compliance isn't particularly important, or "has been achieved" - what is going to happen to the funding of the thing used to achieve compliance? There's only one direction it's going to go in.

When records management has value independent of compliance, our organisations saying "compliance has been achieved" isn't a problem - we just reduce the focus on those areas of our mostly performance oriented function.

It puts us in the driving seat.

We get to decide.

I think focusing on this is more important now than ever before.

Records and Information Management has been playing second fiddle to Information Technology for nearly two decades.

It's changing place at the moment - RIM is getting back on top.

The reason it's happening is because organisations are realising that there are performance gains to be made from the way that information is structured.

It's an opportunity to stand on our own.

An opportunity for a first order impact of improved records management to be organisational performance.

The worst thing that we can do now, is make records management a way to achieve something else.