Why records needs to abandon ISO standards, own business systems first and think about compliance last.

We talk about context a lot in records management.

We lionise it.

We refuse to use systems that aren't ISO compliant, and we go to great lengths to avoid having to deal with structured data.

Mostly that means we're managing incomplete buckets of documents that take hours to read and understand.

In the mean time, our colleagues working with business systems are generally able to open a case (or whatever their subject based classification scheme presents them), and figure out in seconds where that case is in its process, and understand what occurred.

If we were smart, we'd recognise these things - and we'd start trying to convert our paper generating processes into business systems - because they do everything that records stands for, and do it better than records systems.

We'd recognise that if we owned that process and those systems - we'd have better records, and our organisations would value us more because of it.

We'd remember that we're a professional management discipline.

Better business through better records are what we're here for.

Somehow though, despite thousands of years of practice, we've become incapable of doing records unless we have systems compliant with standards only invented in the last 20 years.

And we've left the improvement of record quality to someone else.

And they're winning.

Because they know that they work for businesses*, and the job is to improve the business - and if the compliance standard didn't improve the business, they'd ignore it and improve the business.

Which has generally meant building business systems - because they produce better records, and improve the business.

How on earth did we let someone else take over these critical records systems?

How do we take them back?

*Government is a business - if you think it isn't, think about how many people your organisation helps, and then think about how many it could help if service delivery was twice as efficient/cost half as much.