Why records is the rope in the tug-of-war between archives that regulate them and the businesses they serve

Records is stuck in an interesting place.

On one hand, organisations have to do something that arguably costs more, and that they don't want to do - which is to say, meet a compliance standard that has nothing to do with whether they can effectively meet the needs of their customers and constituencies.

This just means that they don't know how to fund records, they look at it like they're funding concrete inserts for their running shoes - which is to say that they're only going to do it if they're forced to.

On the other hand, archival authorities have written a regulation covering every bit of information created by a public servant - when the reality is that they only care about the very small fraction that's permanent retention.

So you've got an organisation that doesn't want to enforce a compliance standard - but has to fund the activities responsible for meeting it.

And a regulator who won't turn up and enforce - because they don't care about 99.9% of what they regulate.

So where does this leave records?

Holding the tension between these two positions.

Trying to get their organisations to follow the regulation - when there's no business case that says the compliance standard improves the organisation.

Trying to get their archive to turn up and do some enforcement work - when the archive demonstrates every day that it doesn't actually care about compliance - just about the permanent retention content that will one day reach the archive.

What's the solution to this?

Just do good records management work.

What does that mean?

Do projects that use core record keeping and management skills to improve the business of the organisation.

Ignore the compliance standards - all they've done is stop us embracing business systems.

Somehow records has become about compliance.

But compliance has only been a thing for about 50 years.

For thousands of years, record keeping was something that people and organisations did because their lives and their organisations became unmanageable without them.

The role of continuous improver by focusing on recorded and recording information is more valuable now than it ever has been.

Every organisation knows how to fund that - and if a little bit of that funding ends up delivering on compliance outcomes, no one will probably care or notice - because the business case is easy, and the business gets better.

The other alternative is to continue being the rope in the tug of war - and see records gradually pulled apart and replaced by something else that recognises that a part of the organisation that doesn't get funded doesn't exist.