Why everyone in records should be studying the DMBOK
I’ve just sat down to start studying for my CDMP - and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the opening of the DMBOK. No matter what happens into the future with this study path, it’s started well.
So, why should you read the DMBOK if you’re in records?
There are lots of reasons.
The primary one is that records management and data management are bleeding together.
Organisations are finally realising that the risks presented by each one are the same risks, and that the sources of value are also the same.
So while you may need slightly different technical skills to manage the things we refer to as data and records, if you don’t have a single approach, you’re actually running two different risk and value management frameworks when risk and value are generated exactly the same way in both of them.
The second major reason is that I’d be prepared to wager a substantial sum of money that you won’t find anything being managed by “#data” people that wasn’t recorded first - so any idea that data isn’t a record is erroneous, and we should be learning how to manage it.
Third is pure confirmation bias.
There are a couple of recurrent themes in this blog, two among them are -
We need records to have a known economic value - because if they have no economic value, why pay us to manage them?
Our job is to manage the quality of the records we keep - because if quality doesn’t matter, why pay us to manage them - why not just let it be a mess?
The longer we leave these two things to chance, the longer we’ll have people making different decisions about records based on their different appreciation of the value - and there’s no award for knowing that we’ll value them higher than the executives who have been undervaluing them for decades.
This is why I was very pleased to find section 2.4 on page 21 of the DMBOK.
If you stopped there but internalised those principles, I think you’d be getting good value from it.
The DMBOK is available via DAMA, and probably “all good bookshops.”
