Why the obsession with lifecycle and disposition in records?

One of the best pieces of wisdom that I've ever heard was that managers don't solve the problems that they have, they solve the problems they know how to solve - whatever the actual problems they have.

It's a way of saying that we need to pay attention to the situation we're in, and we need to remember what we're being paid to do.

And we are not being paid to implement dogmatic solutions to the problems of the past.

Or solutions that have economics that used to make sense.

The bottom line is that businesses hire managers because they want to improve performance.

And we are no different.

Which leads to the important question, has anyone ever measured the performance improvement that occurs when a business implements lifecycle management?

I can't find any evidence that it does improve it, or that anyone has.

Anywhere.

The only place I see it positioned as the solution to a problem is when i read the history of some of our archives (australian archives).

I see frequent references to "expensive office space" being taken up by records, and concerns about departments that haven't destroyed a record since they were founded.

Of course, these references were in the 1920's, and 1940's.

That seems to be where our thinking on lifecycle management and destruction are stuck.

Dogmatic solutions to real problems.

Everyone else has figured this out.

Which is why disposition is almost impossible to get done.

At least the way we're asking people to do it.

What's missing isn't process.

What's missing are leaders who are prepared to recognise that times are different, and economics are different.

So we have to be different.

Can't get approvals?

Remove the approvals.

Can't get people to press a button?

Automate it.

The the real solution - if we can't distribute responsibility for it (like we've been trying to).

Centralise it.

The real problem with disposition is that we keep trying to get everyone else to take responsibility for it.

Taking responsibility is the first step in leadership.

And leadership is what we need most in the industry at the moment.