You raise an interesting question of how do we get others to care about record quality?
This is where I get on my usual soapbox and cry out that we (as a profession) need to stop promulgating the idea of records as "archives" and us as "archivists", and start making people understand that records are business evidence and records managers are evidence quality assurance "overseers".
Thanks for your comment - it's a completely familiar one for me, and I think we need to have these discussions out in public forums. I'd love to run a workshop on this one actually - PM me if you'd be interested in being a part of it.
I think we have to make quality meaningful. "Quality" is too abstract. We can have professional conversations, but really it comes down to appraisal - and as you say, not archival appraisal, appraisal as it's set out in 15489 - reduction of business risk. We have to get really serious about bigger risks than legislative compliance - because there's no quality there - more compliant is an oxymoron and organisations just think "we're compliant so we should stop spending." Bigger risks - managers making decisions without information because business records make that information impossible to get in a meaningful timeframe, all the efficiency related risks that occur because it's fine to have someone spend 4 minutes (150 times a week) finding and opening a document in a records management system instead of just presenting them the information they need. We just need to use the tools we have to impact performance instead of compliance. We have all the right skills - all this stuff is in the capture and organise (and occasionally pluralise) section of the continuum, we just need to broaden our definition of who we're organising for and consider secondary usage much more heavily than primary usage. The stuff that a friend of mine is doing with SharePoint lists and powerBI in their organisation is AMAZING - but also completely core records stuff because it's just "single source of truth" type stuff that we've been talking about for decades if not millennia.
Hello Karl - always great to read your posts.
You raise an interesting question of how do we get others to care about record quality?
This is where I get on my usual soapbox and cry out that we (as a profession) need to stop promulgating the idea of records as "archives" and us as "archivists", and start making people understand that records are business evidence and records managers are evidence quality assurance "overseers".
But, just how do we do that?
Thanks for your comment - it's a completely familiar one for me, and I think we need to have these discussions out in public forums. I'd love to run a workshop on this one actually - PM me if you'd be interested in being a part of it.
I think we have to make quality meaningful. "Quality" is too abstract. We can have professional conversations, but really it comes down to appraisal - and as you say, not archival appraisal, appraisal as it's set out in 15489 - reduction of business risk. We have to get really serious about bigger risks than legislative compliance - because there's no quality there - more compliant is an oxymoron and organisations just think "we're compliant so we should stop spending." Bigger risks - managers making decisions without information because business records make that information impossible to get in a meaningful timeframe, all the efficiency related risks that occur because it's fine to have someone spend 4 minutes (150 times a week) finding and opening a document in a records management system instead of just presenting them the information they need. We just need to use the tools we have to impact performance instead of compliance. We have all the right skills - all this stuff is in the capture and organise (and occasionally pluralise) section of the continuum, we just need to broaden our definition of who we're organising for and consider secondary usage much more heavily than primary usage. The stuff that a friend of mine is doing with SharePoint lists and powerBI in their organisation is AMAZING - but also completely core records stuff because it's just "single source of truth" type stuff that we've been talking about for decades if not millennia.