What constrains the value of records management.

How organised people are - which is all about the quality of recordkeeping.

The greatest records management in the world is a waste of time, if the quality of the record keeping is poor.

How you think about recordkeeping makes all the difference.

If "recordkeeping" means selecting what stuff to keep after others have decided what to produce - then you're constrained by what other people think is important, your quality will always be a slave to theirs and what you'll end up managing is probably the electronic equivalent of a garbage dump.

If "recordkeeping" means helping them think about what information they should be recording - that's better.

If you go one step further, and help them think about how people are organising their work, what information they need to do their jobs, how that information relates to the quality of outcomes that they can produce, and how they get what they need when they need it - I think you're approaching nirvana. It's also not for the faint of heart - because very quickly you'll find that each thing is tied to everything else.

If there's one truth about organisational life, it's that work is organised using records.

Workflow is a record.

Email is a record.

The to do list is a record.

All the Microsoft 365 tools do is create records.

At the moment, people are mostly doing a really bad job of using all the tools at their disposal to organise and manage their work.

Which is why the quality of the records we have to manage is so low.

Disorganised people produce disorganised records.

The more organised people are, the more organised their records will be, because records are how people organise themselves.

Think about the most organised teams you know. They know what work they have to do, they know what its status is, what's at risk - and they can show it to you. Why? Because they have a record - if they don't have a record, they can't show it to you and coordinating group activity becomes impossible.

The million dollar question for records people, is how long do we wait for someone else to organise people so we can start getting high quality records.

The first step in leadership is taking responsibility for something.