Why practice focus hurts information and records management

We love to focus on practices.

So many discussions seem to revolve around them.

The problem?

Practices are about individual skill, and skilled performance.

We’re the only people in our organisations who want to be information and records managers.

So we’re the only people who we can rely on to want to develop skill in information and records management.

The real problem with practice focus is that it assumes that outcomes are a function of skill - so outcomes will vary with the individual.

What destroys findability?

Outcomes that vary with the individual.

A group of people can only find information consistently if they are all doing the same thing.

We can’t get to people all doing the same thing by focusing on practices.

We only get there by focusing on processes - and treating all of our information and records processes the same way we would treat any other process.

This is hard to see, and ironically, that’s because of practices.

Standard practice was once to arrange all records functionally.

We made that too hard though, and people wouldn’t take the time to develop the skill required to use the functional arrangement.

So we lost control - or more accurately, we lost the privilege of structuring information for people.

Now we need them to do it themselves.

But asking them to focus on practices won’t get it there.

It actively hurts the conversation because we don’t need highly skilled individuals using expert judgement in a team to get good information outcomes.

We need everyone doing the same thing.

That makes it a process problem.

Not a practice problem.