Why we have to be responsible for the quality of the records we manage, and what can be done when we are.

Quality is hard to understand.

We are generally quality insensitive - except when we know that something isn't good enough for the thing that we want to do with it.

To me, this is the crux of the issue and the reason we need to own quality.

Records isn't being done by qualified and experienced records managers any more.

It's being done by ordinary people who have stuff to do.

Outside of that thing they have to do, how much do they care if the records they've created are good enough to enable secondary usage?

IN my experience - they don't generally care.

They might care if they understood.

Understood that the information contained in the record they've created could be used to make better capacity management decisions in the organisation, or understood that the poor quality record they've created means their organisation will under perform a competitor in a critical area.

The challenge though, is that they often don't join the dots.

It's not their job.

Whose job is it?

Ask most people in records management, and they'll say "the business is responsible for quality" - or something like that.

And we could leave it there.

The challenge for us as a profession though, is that when a business unit stakeholder finally decides to fix something, who do they call?

A "data" person.

A "business improvement" person.

An "IT" person.

Not generally a records person.

They don't link the problem they're having back to poor quality records.

They link it to "bad data."

If they don't decide it's bad data, the business improvement person most likely will, and the IT person definitely will - or they'll do the next best thing and decide they need some "software" to fix the problem.

What does this mean for us as a profession?

We are generally only managing the unstructured information.

When there's a quality problem, it gets solved by people outside of records who use a structured information tool and put it in the control of someone else.

So our jobs get smaller.

This vicious cycle has been underway for 20 years.

I think we can turn it around.

There's no one way that's going to get it done - but there are lots of tools, and lots of opportunities.

At the core of it though, is the quality of the records we manage.

If they're only fit to be records of what happened to the primary user, and not good enough to enable efficient secondary usage by a variety of stakeholders we're going to be replaced by the first automated tool that can do in place sentencing.

If we take responsibility for quality and secondary usage though, how many more problems in our organisation become records problems?

How long will the queue at our door be to fix all these problems?