Two ways to divide records creators and users, and what they need help with.

First - thanks to Bud Porter-Roth for provoking this post.

In a comment on a recent post, Bud suggested (and I’m paraphrasing) that RM falls into two categories - hard and soft. Hard are professions like accounting, HR, finance, legal etc. where RM process is part of their basic mindset, and Soft - sales, marketing, administration etc. - where it isn't.

It got me thinking about these two groups, why they are where they are, and what that means about how we should support them with records practice.

When I look at the hard records group, what I see is a group that has a body of accepted professional practice with relatively consistent ideas about process, an expected level of performance, and an understanding that when they fail at records, that level of performance deteriorates dramatically. This basically means that they understand their risks and how records mitigate them, and their focus is on maintaining a specific standard - which is what our records should help with.

This means that practice should likely centre around ensuring the completeness of records, that details of processes and procedures aren't missed, and that anomalies are flagged.

When I look at the soft records group, I see a group that doesn't have the same approach to professional practice. I've worked in many sales and marketing groups, and there has been little commonality in how they worked. There are lots of ways to get to the end, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of consensus about what good practice looks like.

What this means for the soft group, is that the opportunity is to improve performance - not to maintain it. The way records needs to support this group, is to help them organise and manage their work in consistent ways using records so that performance improves.

I'm still not sure I'm articulating it well, I'm not sure this is right - but it feels like there's the grain of a big insight here.

What do you think?