The retention schedule - principal destroyer of the value of records management.

Recently I finished reading a book about the history of double entry accounting. I'm also on and off again with a book about how states govern. Both books reveal the strategic and operational power of great records management.

They also raise serious questions for me about the state of professional practice, and some of our most basic tools.

Records management obsesses over retention and disposition. I think this has done huge damage to our profession.

Part of the problem is that it creates a belief that records is mostly about looking backwards.

This isn't true, but I'm not sure that's clear from how records management is generally implemented.

If we look at where recordkeeping came from, it was always people who had a couple of very simple problems to deal with -

1. They had something valuable that they needed to manage.

2. They needed to remember things about it reliably.

3. They needed to record something so that another person could remember it.

Basically, they were practical people with stuff to do.

How worried were they about not having a correct retention and disposition schedule?

I'd say not at all.

How worried were they about keeping their stuff for posterity and historical value?

I'd also say not at all.

How worried were they about being effective managers of their tasks and assets?

I'd say super concerned - or why keep records at all?

When I read ISO15489 2016, I am always struck by the appraisal section.

It asks us to manage business risks using our skills.

The accounting profession have been doing this for hundreds of years, and have gone from strength to strength.

Then I look at much of records practice and what it is aimed at.

In most organisations that I work with, practice aims to satify archival lefislation.

The challenge for archival legislation, its custodians, and for us, is that it is unenforceable.

This is why one ever shows up to enforce it.

Unenforceable legislation isn't a business risk.

Meanwhile, serious people with things to do are struggling to manage them all.

They risk being ineffective every single day because of poor record keeping.

And we aren't helping them.

Because we're focused on retention and disposition, and the things that need to happen for it to work.

They're struggling because they don't understand the power of records management to help them.

Given the way we practice though, I have to ask - have we forgotten what records management is for?

Once it was a discipline with strategic and operational power.

Now practice seems to be about destroying documents.

What happened?