What quality means when it comes to records and information and why it's the biggest opportunity we have to raise our professional profiles

Quality is has to be one of the most mis-used words in the English language.

It's also the biggest opportunity in Information and Records Management right now.

When we say quality, people think "Mercedes" or some kind of premium brand.

In a business context though, quality just means "meets the specification."

So the questions become -

1. Who decides the specification?

2. What level of quality is achievable in the organisation?

3. What level of quality makes sense for us to invest in?

Many of you will recognise that we already do this in records.

This is what we do with metadata standards, and system standards. We say "this is the quality we expect our records to have."

The challenge is that our quality standards aren't generally chosen by us based on our specific context.

Generally, they're imposed by archival institutions who are trying to get a rolls royce out of the end of the process while being far enough removed from the process that they don't have to deal with the cost.

The challenge of a rolls royce level of quality, is that it is both unattainable and undesirable for most organisations because it introduces a level of quality that has no practical value.

Yes, having the corporate seal stamped on every contract the organisation enters into might raise the quality of the contract by some definition, but the board are unlikely to want to show up to every time the organisation orders takeaway food, or stationary, or toilet paper, and the organisation generally needs to order those things fatser than a board can move.

This analogy might not be helping, so here's are some practical examples.

"Text searchable on demand" might define a quality goal that we could set.

Why would we do this?

A handwritten record represents a certain type of quality.

How does that quality level impact our business processes?

You all know this, but just to be plain for anyone outside our industry, a physical record isn't easily searchable - it can be done, but a human has to read it, so the cost of searching that document is the cost of the time to retrieve it from wherever it was, and the cost of getting a person to read it.

That means that there are lots of things that we might use that information for, that we just can't - because it's too expensive to find it.

An electronic document that's been OCR'd on the other hand, the incremental cost of searching the next one is zero - so using it to inform a decision becomes something that is actually doable.

That is kind of obvious.

A more meaningful quality goal might be that the status of work processes associated with an aggregation is known.

Why would we do this?

For starters, it's a useful retention trigger.

It's also useful information for managers who are trying to understand the status of the work their team is performing, and whether they need to take action to ensure work is completed by a deadline.

It might also mean that we know when a document has been finalised - which can give us a certain understanding about how authoritative that document is.

In both of these cases, we make a meaningful change to the quality of our records, and create a meaningful set of benefits to the organisation.

It did come at a cost though.

Either people or technical systems had to do things to make that happen.

Buying a technical system without a business case to do so is both silly and unethical.

Forcing people to raise the level of quality of records in ways that are meaningless to them is a cost that they just won't bear.

So the level of quality has to be appropriate to the amount of work, and the amount of cost that its going to require of people.

The challenge is, that people aren't information and records management experts.

They just don't know what quality options are on the table.

Metadata driven management reporting - no idea.

Document finalisation - no idea.

Automatic metadata extraction from documents - no idea.

This is an opportunity for us.

One of the big challenges for IRM in almost every organisation is that people are insensitive to quality because no one has ever shown them how improved quality can help them achieve results meaningful to them.

This is the opportunity for records management now.