Superior and inferior patterns in records management

Every professional group creates, arranges and describes its records to suit the work it needs to do.

When people are working on their own, they can organise their records however they like.

At any meaningful scale however, the division of work and the specialisation of tasks means the records become the primary link between people with work to do.

This means that the records become the work that they need to do.

There is no separation between the work and the records.

So not only are the records essential, they are the work, and the way they are created, arranged and described determines what gets done, when, how, and how efficiently and effectively.

The pattern of the work, creates the pattern of the records.

Once upon a time, we had neat points of separation that meant two work record systems didn't have to co-exist.

The work of records management was separate from the other types of work.

We could arrange the records in ways that suited us

Then, all of a sudden, we had records system users, not records system professionals.

And of course, it was our system, to arrange our work, and so we expected people to arrange their work to suit us.

And for the last 20 years, organisations have spent huge amounts of money building records management systems that no one uses - because the pattern that they ask people to work to, the pattern that supports our work, our pattern, is inferior to the pattern they want to work to, for the work they have to do.

Data management professionals realised this earlier than we did, because the arc of time between systems designed only for professionals, and systems designed for users was far shorter than it was for records people.

Simply put, their systems had users earlier than ours did.

They had their failures.

And whole knowledge areas developed to address them.

Because the people building the systems knew that the whole purpose of their profession was to support the work that needed to be done.

They realised that if their specialised knowledge and systems made the work harder, their knowledge wouldn’t be desired, and their systems wouldn’t be used.

They didn’t realise that quickly though - they had their own crises.

Huge amounts of money spend building systems and doing work that made things harder, not easier - and occasionally they still get it wrong - because the work is complex, and the technology is complex, and the system it has to exist in is complex.

Mostly though, they match the pattern of the system, to the pattern of the work that needs to be done.

And everyone gains.

Records management is going through the same crisis at the moment.

The good thing for us, is that the evolution of data focused records professions (yes, it’s all recorded) gives us a useful pattern that we can use to understand how to change.

At the moment, records management is stuck between patterns that worked, and patterns that don’t.

The principal problem is finding ways to do our work without needing to restructure the work of the people records is supposed to be serving.

The lesson we should take from data, is that the structure of the records needs to reflect the structure of the work.

The lesson we should take from our own experience is that the way people structure their work doesn’t suit our work - and that’s why we fail when we try and restructure their records to suit us.

If we are going to succeed, we have to recognise that their pattern of organisation is superior for their work, and they won’t thank us for changing it. Success for us only comes when we can do our work without changing any of the patterns associated with theirs.