The salvation of records management

Is in coming to grips with the active phases of the records lifecycle.

The first step in that, is recognising that our discipline doesn’t understand it, but thinks it does.

The entire system of practice that we have, for hundreds, if not thousands of years, has had an inherent assumption in it, that records come to us when they are not active.

In response, ‘we’ developed a system of practice to manage things that are not active.

The boundary between the practices we have, and the practices we need, is (in my opinion at least) inherent in this idea.

Like many others, I have a long running internal dialectic about archives management and records management, and whether they are an integrated discipline, or whether they are two disciplines that need separation.

The core of it comes from exactly the problem above - archival practice is oriented towards managing things whose active life has ended - whose primary informational value relates to transactions that have completed.

The value of a system of management in those phases, is that is reliably allows a consumer of the records to understand the context in which they were created when the consumer has no involvement in the transaction itself, and likely no working knowledge of the organisational system that created the records either.

When we are in the active phase of the life cycle, the primary value of records is that they can inform future stages of transactions that are happening right now.

The value of a system of management in those phases must be that it creates recorded information in a way that is useful to people who are involved in the transaction, and involved in the organisational system that is creating the records.

Underlying this, is a question about what records are for, and who is to produce the value from managing them.

If records are for long term accountability - and that’s it, archival theory and records theory should be one integrated piece.

Being clear, I think this is a value judgement.

It’s a high leverage value judgement though - a decision one way or the other sets very different paths for the future.

If we stay integrated, and we focus on long-term accountability, the path we need to take involves developing practices and technologies that can create transactional aggregations out of many data sources containing many different types of data. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post asking where the narratives are in records systems - because ultimately that’s what we’re concerned about in the future, reconstructing the narrative of a transaction. This is what long term accountability systems need to do for us - give us ways of assembling coherent narratives that are transportable.

It’s a nice idea, and congruent with ‘archives as accumulations’ - we develop systems that mean the whole organisation can change how it does what it does, and it doesn’t matter to us, the transactional narratives accumulate anyway - which is quite consistent with what we want out of functional arrangements and EDRMS. In terms of what that looks like, I think it looks like what we currently see out of the graph based systems investigators use to piece together narratives.

What this way also does, is remove the system of records management, from the system of work management - it isn’t ‘manage-in-place’, but it’s the core of the manag-in-place promise - do your work, and the record will be kept without you having to do anything.

The other way, is that we recognise we don’t understand the active phases of the lifecycle, but that the quality of everything that comes afterwards depends on it - so we must be involved, or we cannot get good quality outcomes. To do this, we recognise that the primary values of a record are in serving the information needs of the next step of a transaction, and in the impact the record has on the quality of outcome experienced by the clients of the transaction, and we work to deliver those things more effectively - and get high quality archives as a byproduct of the increased quality of records - because we can bring a unique understanding of transactional thinking and evidence to the process of record creation.

So, which way lies salvation?

I don’t know.

What I know, is that people need to understand the work we do, and understand the gains it produces so that they know what they are funding.

The economics of paper meant that our practices created gains so large, that we didn’t really have to think about or justify them. Those gains though, were a unique product of paper economics that was made neat (and possible) by the fact that we had separate active lifecycle systems of work, and an inactive lifecycle system of managing the records that did not overlap.

We are still promising the benefits of that system, and unless we’re dealing with paper, they don’t exist. I would argue that many of our practices are value destroyers - which is a painful statement to make, but the simple example can be seen in EDRMS - those systems were bought and built on the basis they would hold all of the organisations records, and audit reports keep telling us they’re holding a single digit percentage of the records, meaning that the unused fraction is a cost the organisation is a cost from which the organisation gains no value. Where else in an organisation can we find a system that manages less than 10% of the processes it was supposed to, that still has its bill paid?

The salvation of records management lies in having absolute clarity about what we do, and the value that it produces - and this will be better for us, and better for our organisations, because nothing hurts more than violated expectations. What we have now leaves us feeling let down by our organisation - because we think we produce so much value, and the funding we receive is never at the level of the value we believe we deliver. What we deliver now, leaves our organisations feeling let down by us, because they buy us based on promises of value that we don’t deliver on - because they are promises based on a set of economics that no longer exist. The key to squaring this circle, is (in my view) a decision about how we work with the active phase of the lifecycle. We cannot keep asking people to arrange and do their active-phase work in ways that increase the information cost of future process participants for outcomes that their management team hasn’t bought into, all of the evidence tells us, that it just doesn’t work. This means we need to either come to grips with the active lifecycle phase, and find ways to achieve our longer term outcomes, while enhancing theirs (so that they will fund it), or we need to understand that the active phase is off limits, and find ways to achieve our longer-term outcomes that don’t require any action - but that also deliver enough value at a low enough cost that our organisations will fund them.