The records skill that we're not using and that businesses want

As much as I want us to focus on operational matters and performance improvement - because I think that taking responsibility for performance puts us in the driving seat - there are areas where I believe that we have a more unique contribution to make.

Appraisal is a unique skill - or at least, appraisal the way it's written in our standards is.

Organisations need help understanding their risks, and record tools and techniques are one solution to many problems - because many of them can be managed or just plain removed by recording specific information at a specific level of quality, and specific time.

We do have to make sure that we're talking about the right kind of appraisal though.

I've noted before that ISO15489:2016 included an appraisal section that wasn't previously there.

ISO not archival appraisal.

It's appraisal focused on managing business risks using records tools and techniques.

And if we embrace it, we've got a real value stream that organisations need - right now.

Let's be clear though, as an industry, we've messed up the transition.

That's why organisations have privacy teams AND records teams.

And if you don't agree - find me anything about privacy that doesn't involve a decision about what and how to record, or not record, and what to destroy, or not destroy.

That should be us.

But the scope of practice under this definition of appraisal is so much wider than what we've ever done before.

This is a double edged sword.

It gives us scope to offer our organsations something new that they likely can't get anywhere else, but it also means that we have to be courageous, and take risks.

The good news is, that we'll fall into the same trap as every other profession - so they're small risks.

The trap is that we'll the problem through our own lens.

So we'll just be one proposal.

The insurance team will propose insurance.

The vendor management team will propose outsourcing.

The IT team will propose a new shiny system.

This might not seem like a good thing - but it means that we don't have to expose ourselves too badly - we're just one more proposal for review.

Do it right, and they'll call this brand of records thinking "innovation."

Tell them that the solution is to put the documents into an EDRMS, they'll call us other names.

To put the proposal on the table though, we really have to get to know the business process.

Simple example of what I mean.

There's a CIO that I know (an amazingly information savvy CIO) who tells a story about an organisation he worked for that offered loans to people who wouldn't normally be able to get them - people with no deposit, poor income, reverse mortgages - that sort of thing.

The thing they were finding, is that these people - who were making the largest financial commitment of their lives - were taking amazing contemporaneous notes.

So they were recording commitments made by the organisation - or things that sounded like commitments - with a much greater degree of fidelity than the organisation was.

When the organisation did something that seemed contra to whatever they'd understood (and recorded) the agreement to be, they were taking the organisation to the financial services ombudsman.

And the ombudsman was finding against the organisation.

It was finding for the people who kept the better records - that could produce proof of greater evidential weight.

And the ombudsman was directing the organisation to write off all the interest ever - people still had to pay the principal back, but almost all the profit in a finance company is in the interest.

So all the profit was disappearing - and not just the virtual profit in the forecast, the profit that had already been spent to make payroll, and pay for offices.

How did they solve the problem?

Better records.

Contemporaneous notes, on a file, about every phone call, every email.

KPId, managed, governed - kept like it mattered, because the profit impact was HUGE.

AND some changes to legal terms and conditions, and probably half a dozen other things, nothing good is done by just one person or group.

Two things we should take away.

First - Records management as it is mostly practiced now, wouldn't have prevented this problem.

It doesn't matter how effective we are at "keeping"/"managing" the records that have been created, or how good our EDRMS, is if the evidence we needed to ensure a fair and just outcome was never recorded.

Second - the only good, forward looking solution to this problem involves appraising the process and identifying poor or missing record creation, specifying the records that need to be created (ie. assuring record quality) and designing a process that captures them, at the required level of quality, and governs them like they matter.

And the work can either be done by a BA from IT.

Or us.

Either way, the value proposition that we're going to provide fair and just outcomes by gold plating the storage of records that don't exist (what got them into this mess) is pretty hollow.

And the gap is obvious.

And it needs someone to fill it.

And the ISO standard that underpins our entire profession says that it's what we should be doing.

What are we waiting for?

PS. I posted a bit of a rant along these lines a few days ago and got a bunch of unsubscribes. This just says to me that there are still lots of people who are waiting for someone to come and save records the way many of us want to do it without realising that the ISO committee has already provided most of what we need to save records - it just requires us to change, and change is hard, or people don't want to.