The best records manager I've ever met and what their practice means for us

I don’t think I’ve been subtle about the fact I think Records Management is a discipline in crisis.

Over the years, I’ve been trying to find lenses that help other people see the crisis that I see.

The crisis many people see, is a crisis of people in organisations not being made to do it like the records managers say.

The crisis I see, is the failure of records management to adapt to changing circumstances so that it still produces the value organisations will pay for, when key underlying context has changed.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about what policy means for records management, and why something with such obvious value needs policy at all.

Twenty five years ago, very little was electronic, and mostly, people didn’t really need to be told to give their stuff to the records management team. They were eventually crushed between the economics of office space and the economics of finding paper in a mess. Give it to the records team, and make your staff give their stuff to the records management team, and there’s a good chance you’ll be able to find it in the future. Do the opposite, and (regulation or not) you’ll eventually have to move out of your office because it will be full of paper, and you won’t be able to find the things you need without going through most of it anyway - because you haven’t got a set of techniques around how to create a good catalogue, and arrange the records so things are findable again by people who weren’t doing the work on the day.

What was the role of policy in that situation?

Well, we had legislation that said we needed to do records management, and we needed to be accountable that we had a program, and the policy and associated records really let us say to the regulator ‘here it is, we’ve done what you asked’, and helped the records team understand what they were supposed to do - the same thing they’d done in every other agency, pretty much exactly the same way. Not something they needed a lot of help with.

Now though, policy and legislation is the hammer that records teams use to hit people when they’re not doing exactly what records teams say, exactly how they say it. Or at least, it was - until about ten years ago when everyone realised that trying to hit people with the compliance stick just meant they went from talking to you, to ignoring you completely. Which means that now, policy and legislation is mostly the thing that we use to whinge to one another about how people aren’t doing ‘the right thing’. What we’re really doing though, is insulating ourselves from the responsibility of changing practices so that they are well adapted to deliver value in the circumstances we find ourselves in now.

The basic need that records serve, hasn’t changed in a millennia. Our memory is still horrifically limited - both in integrity and capacity, and we can’t share a memory, so we make records. The underlying value of records management to organisations also hasn’t changed. It is still the value of improved performance through systematising record making and keeping. Two things have really changed - the underlying technology people use to make records now, and the primary focus of the work that’s done in the records management system.

And therein lies the problem.

What does the best records manager I’ve ever met have to do with this?

I sat down with this person many years ago for the first time, to discuss their practices.

They described how they go about their work, it went something like…

“When I come into a new organisation, I spend a couple of weeks walking around and talking to people about how they use information in their work, and what’s working, and what doesn’t work. When I’ve collected enough information problems, I put a business case and a program of work together to address the major problems. Then we implement the program.”

This practitioner is a Chief Information Officer - and one of the few I know who really understands the role of technology. Unfortunately, almost no records people would look at them and think of them as a records manager. This is despite the fact that their work revolves entirely around recorded information, how people make, keep, and manage records, and how that relates to the performance of the organisation.

The reason we need to pay attention to this type of practitioner, is that I don’t think I’ve ever heard them use the word ‘policy’ before, and I might have heard them use the words ‘records management’ a handful of times. Despite that, every time I go to one of the organisations they’ve worked in, records management is seen as a source of value to the organisation, the person leading records management has a seat at the table of executive meetings, and the systems they’re implementing to get the work done, are records systems with metadata that should be the envy of everyone.

What really differentiates their work, is that they’re not looking at the archival legislation as the foundation of their work, everything archives want gets solved as a byproduct of their work. They don’t have any problems funding itm, because there’s so much money left over from improving the performance of the organisation through better records, that anything the archives want done is a rounding error on the rounding errors on the business case. Getting records right - and taking the archival focus out of it, means that there’s enough money to go around for records AND archives.

Just to note too, that a major differentiator for this person is that they’re a records purist - they work with all recorded information, they haven’t fallen into the trap of ignoring business systems or any other form of record because of some erroneous idea about format - so they work with every system. They’re not sitting around talking about how the data/IT people won’t let them implement a records policy, they’ve just got right on with showing how the quality of records relates to the performance of the organisation. Because they’ve been successful at doing this, the organisation trusts that the interests of the organisation are at the heart of this person’s work - so they just get to do their work, regardless of the system

What this person’s work says to me, is that organisations will invest in the kind of outcomes that every archival authority wants when they are shown how those outcomes will provide value to the organisation. Until they are shown how they have value, organisations don’t care how ‘best’ a practice is, or who the regulator is, they look at the ask, consider their fiduciary duties, look at their very long priority list, and then look at whether what is being asked is in line with those duties.

The biggest thing we should keep in mind though, is that to me, this person is a records purist. They know intimately how the quality of records relates to the performance of the organisation. So many of us who claim to be records purists got lost along the way somewhere. Records became about the structure of practice, not the value of the certainty records provides in a world full of things that change.

What this person’s practice means for us, is that we need to recapture our role as people who enhance the value of recorded information for our organisations.

It says that organisations will invest in it.

It says that when they do, the gains can be so large that what’s left is enough for anything that archives want.

All we have to do, is remember what practice was supposed to be about, and act on it.