What a survey of your management teams will tell you about records

Spoiler - records management compliance isn’t anywhere on their lists.

Try it if you’d like to.

Survey your top tier executives and the middle management of your entire organisation.

Ask them what their top 3 priorities are for the coming year.

Expand it to their top 5 or 10 if you like.

Think you're going to find records management in any of them?

The reason this is important is simple.

Go and start reading books about priority setting.

The message that overwhelmingly comes back is that outside the top 3 priorities, things just don't get done.

This is important.

If you try and take them away from those three things, and they're a disciplined performer, they'll just ignore you or fob you off.

This leaves you trying to work with the undisciplined ....performers?...

The only hope you have, is to present records as something that improves their chance of getting those things done.

The other way to think about that, is to say that you need to approach them with things that reduce their risk of failing at the things that are most important to them in the coming year.

If you're going to them with things that you think should do that, and they're saying no, one of two things has happened -

1. You're not improving their chances.

2. You're too expensive - because more resources almost always improves the chance of getting things done, less resources almost always reduces it.

Here's something to think about.

Does "put it in an compliant recordkeeping system" improve their chances of getting it done?

Does "use a functional classification" reduce their risk of failure?

What questions are they going to get if they go to IT?

They're probably going to end up speaking to a business analyst who's going to focus on two things.

What's your business process?

What data does it need?

In the context of these four questions, if they have a choice between going to records and getting a document repository or going to IT and getting a process management system, who do you think they're going to choose?

I think that the answer to that is pretty obvious.

Here's a question for debate though.

Which approach is going to produce better records as judged by the people with the 3 priorities?