Why you need internally focused and externally focused measures of records performance

The truth of regulatory compliance is that the performance of an organisation against it is mostly dependent on the regulator.

Regulators that take serious regulatory actions tend to get serious responses from those that they regulate - and thus high rates of compliance.

Regulators that don't take serious regulatory action, typically have low levels of compliance.

If you hang your entire records program on a measure of performance that's mostly dependent on someone else, you're taking your own performance out of your own hands before you've even started.

If though, you can sit down with and agree to performance objectives that are meaningful to your business stakeholders, regulatory performance (what we might call "compliance") just becomes another measure on a scoreboard that has many measures that are more meaningful to your organisation.

And your program can still be a success - even if your regulator isn't.