You can now find this blog at metairm.substack.com ..read more

Something that has made me alternately frustrated, depressed and extremely angry in the last few months is that there appears to be NO research about the impact of classification scheme design on records management system usage. In the face of no research, I’ve had many arguments with long standing practitioners who tell me that the practices we use are “well proven” – while conveniently ignoring rates of systematic control of records between 10 and 20%, and the FACT that when you put people on a windows file server and let them organise their own information, they happily implement a classifi ..read more

User experience research. I think it’s the core of what’s missing from records management. We have a unique value proposition – which is the concept of business evidence and it is timeless and will be fit for purpose forever. But… 20 years ago a different group of people started doing records management. Records management went from being done by professionals to being something that was done by people using what professionals had built. Simply put, 20 years ago, we started to have to look after users. But no one has ever trained us to look after users. Universities don’t teach us how to look ..read more

Recently I’ve been discussing records practice with people and looking for the evidence that it is succeeding. The thing that keeps happening, is that we reach a point on a discussion of a practice where whoever I’m discussing it with will say “it’s well proven” – or something to that effect. What is interesting about this, is that the anecdotal feedback I get from the organisations I talk to is that records practice is currently gaining systematic control of between 10% and 30% of records. To me, this doesn’t say that practice in its current form is succeeding. Logically, this means that the ..read more

It means to use something built by a professional. We have to rememebr this, because the vast majority of records best practice is developed by professionals for professionals. We are a profession with 5000 years of being done by professionals, for professionals. The problem though, is that the vast majority of records management is now done by users – and this has only been the case for about 20 years. So we have a problem. 5000 years of professional records management. 20 years of users. Our training and resources teach us how to think like professionals. This means that if we build systems ..read more

I’m going to say up front that it doesn’t matter what definition you use. Just that you use one. Because: “Records is just the paper.” “Email aren’t records.” “Post it notes aren’t records.” “That’s not a record, it’s a database.” These are all idiotic blanket statements made by records illiterate people who can influence your executives. They are also idiotic blanket statements made by records illiterate people who use them as rules to decide whether they will keep a record. When we let other people decide what records is, we end up with whatever illiterate thing people decide to give us. A ..read more

I think it starts with three questions – Where is the organisation under performing because it does not have efficient access to reliable business evidence? Where is the organisation accumulating an excess of business risk that we can mitigate through better business evidence? Which strategic priorities of the executive team are going to fail without a strategy for business evidence? I think that once you’ve answered those questions, you have everything you need to work on ..read more

Is a service management platform. The next thing the team should do is refuse to accept any work that isn’t directed via the service management platform. The reason is simple – most records teams struggle to justify their value. The simplest relationship in value management is “cost” to “how much stuff you do.”” If you can’t measure it, you have no basis for telling the organisation how much work you’re doing for them – and how much value they’re getting from you. As the old saying goes, “if you can’t measure it” you can’t tell people what they’re paying you for. If you can’t tell people what ..read more

The two big questions on my mind are: How do we do this? What happens if we don’t? The majority of people that I talk to aren’t doing it. They’re also struggling for funding because executives making capital allocation decisions are allocating their capital to everything else. Why though would an executive allocate scarce capital resources to something with no quantified value? If no-one is quantifying the value, all the executive is going to see is the cost. Left column – -$1,000,000, right column +0. So I think what happens is what we’ve got now – records chronically under-funded and poorl ..read more

People who aren’t thinking about records. This is something I’ve noticed consistently. The best records systems are built by people who are thinking about the information that people need to get their job done, and how they deliver it to them when they need it. No other focus gets people thinking as hard about classifications that match the way people think about their work. No other focus does as well at making sure people understand what’s in it for them when it comes time to put a record in the system. No other focus ties the records system so clearly to organisational performance – and tha ..read more