delivering on performance sounds like a great way to demonstrate the value of what we do. So, who gets to decide what RM performance measures look like? Who will set the standard? Or should it be left to organisations to decide for themselves (which isn't always a good idea when it comes to deciding what performance measures should look like).
I wonder if this is an industry standard in the making?
Measurement definitely needs to change, but I'm not sure it's a standards thing - probably only a practice thing. At the moment we generally measure a lot of stuff that doesn't have any impact on business performance - it's more risk focused. The challenge of what I'm proposing is that it will produce a performance gain for a business process - as opposed to producing a performance gain for records management. I think this is actually a better situation - as long as we get the measurement right. If we can measure the cost/time/whatever of a process prior to a records intervention, and then measure it afterwards on a per process-instance basis, we can start to create a scorecard for records that says "records saved the organisation $x on this process" - then each year you can look at how many times the process runs and chalk up a saving (or gain) because of the intervention.
One of the huge challenges we have in records is that all execs ever see is the cost side of the ledger. We're not showing them the impact on business performance of simple interventions that we can make, so we're not getting the opportunity to make more simple interventions.
The thinking about this really started a couple of years ago when I talked to an information manager at a council. He'd just spend a heap of time re-titling a file series, and when we talked about it, it was actually a huge gain for the organisation - literally half an FTE, but the gain wasnt being measured anywhere - so the RM team has just reduced costs for the org by $50k, but doesn't get any credit for it - and next year when the team does 20% more cases, it will be $60k. Most of my thinking about how to measure RM is really driven by thinking about this problem.
What we need is a circumstance where we can measure the cumulative impact of good information management, and show the gains each year - gains that will be foregone if the team is downsized/under-resourced. ie. if you did 20 of those type projects over a 5 year period, and every year you went into the executive to show that not only do we have the cumulative effect of that last 5 years (about $1M/year), we've just saved you another $200k with records interventions this year we might find it easier to get funding and find that executives were more reluctant to take away our staff.
Does that make sense, or does it all sound a bit pie in the sky?
My theory is that just about all our gains being made actually within the business. Records management in a lot of organisations like mine has been pushed out to the end user, so that's where he RM efficiencies need to occur. But end users aren't records managers, so they need my team to give them the right tools, assist them to improve their processes and make RM as automatic as possible for them. Luckily, business processes are usually easy enough to cost, so then the dollar value of the RM improvements are easy to identify. I'm spending as much time as possible out in the business to test this theory.
Hi Karen, I missed your comment, I was on holidays - but I wish I hadn't. You make great points, I'd love to talk to you about how it's been and how you're going about it. There's probably a lot of great lessons in it that I'd love to share with people.
"who gets to decide what RM performance measures look like" - the people signing the cheques for the records management function. They get to decide but they may need help in understanding that.
I think they're already deciding - and the performance measure they generally choose is cost reduction, generally by reducing the budget because they don't understand what they should be getting out of it, and we're crap at telling them.
Hi Karl,
delivering on performance sounds like a great way to demonstrate the value of what we do. So, who gets to decide what RM performance measures look like? Who will set the standard? Or should it be left to organisations to decide for themselves (which isn't always a good idea when it comes to deciding what performance measures should look like).
I wonder if this is an industry standard in the making?
Measurement definitely needs to change, but I'm not sure it's a standards thing - probably only a practice thing. At the moment we generally measure a lot of stuff that doesn't have any impact on business performance - it's more risk focused. The challenge of what I'm proposing is that it will produce a performance gain for a business process - as opposed to producing a performance gain for records management. I think this is actually a better situation - as long as we get the measurement right. If we can measure the cost/time/whatever of a process prior to a records intervention, and then measure it afterwards on a per process-instance basis, we can start to create a scorecard for records that says "records saved the organisation $x on this process" - then each year you can look at how many times the process runs and chalk up a saving (or gain) because of the intervention.
One of the huge challenges we have in records is that all execs ever see is the cost side of the ledger. We're not showing them the impact on business performance of simple interventions that we can make, so we're not getting the opportunity to make more simple interventions.
The thinking about this really started a couple of years ago when I talked to an information manager at a council. He'd just spend a heap of time re-titling a file series, and when we talked about it, it was actually a huge gain for the organisation - literally half an FTE, but the gain wasnt being measured anywhere - so the RM team has just reduced costs for the org by $50k, but doesn't get any credit for it - and next year when the team does 20% more cases, it will be $60k. Most of my thinking about how to measure RM is really driven by thinking about this problem.
What we need is a circumstance where we can measure the cumulative impact of good information management, and show the gains each year - gains that will be foregone if the team is downsized/under-resourced. ie. if you did 20 of those type projects over a 5 year period, and every year you went into the executive to show that not only do we have the cumulative effect of that last 5 years (about $1M/year), we've just saved you another $200k with records interventions this year we might find it easier to get funding and find that executives were more reluctant to take away our staff.
Does that make sense, or does it all sound a bit pie in the sky?
My theory is that just about all our gains being made actually within the business. Records management in a lot of organisations like mine has been pushed out to the end user, so that's where he RM efficiencies need to occur. But end users aren't records managers, so they need my team to give them the right tools, assist them to improve their processes and make RM as automatic as possible for them. Luckily, business processes are usually easy enough to cost, so then the dollar value of the RM improvements are easy to identify. I'm spending as much time as possible out in the business to test this theory.
Hi Karen, I missed your comment, I was on holidays - but I wish I hadn't. You make great points, I'd love to talk to you about how it's been and how you're going about it. There's probably a lot of great lessons in it that I'd love to share with people.
"who gets to decide what RM performance measures look like" - the people signing the cheques for the records management function. They get to decide but they may need help in understanding that.
I think they're already deciding - and the performance measure they generally choose is cost reduction, generally by reducing the budget because they don't understand what they should be getting out of it, and we're crap at telling them.