On records

When I learned that the internet seminar I developed and offered in collaboration with ARMA International had attracted 551 registrants well in advance, I was delighted, and curious. When that number icreased to 1100 by September 28 and closed at 1186 by October 6, I felt honoured, and still very curious. Why had this seminar attracted such interest? What might have caused such a record number of participants?

ARMA International has been gracious enough to put it down to my professional renown, such as it is. It seems a stretch to think that my own reputation is so wide spread as to draw such a crowd from across the globe. So, I conclude, it is the topic that resonates.

Seven Questions Guide Records Management Strategy & Implementation. Seven uncomplicated questions provide a framework for uncovering all the information necessary to run an enterprise, and to manage its corporate memory. Presented with insights into how recorded information management fits within a senior management perspective, the presentation invites records management professionals to embrace the complexity that is part and parcel of describing and management the corporate brain. It is a topic for our time.

Authentic, reliable, transparent and accountable.

The decisions of government, enterprises large and small must be all of these. And, as the world comes to grips with the smoke and mirrors that represent, drive and misrepresent the global economy, we who understand the professional domain of recorded information management know that ultimately, everything rests on accurate recordkeeping. It is the foundation of knowing.

Recently, I contributed a module on knowledge captured in multi-media containers (records) for a graduate course, Knowledge Management in Health Care, for the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Mid-career professionals from a variety of health related enterprises: public, private and non-profit sectors from across Canada. Like their counterparts in every sector, they are knowledgeable and skilled at the running of organizations. And, like their counterparts in so many industries, some spoke of record keeping and the activities that might derive from the existence of recorded information as "maybe a good thing", but essentially not "the real work" and perhaps a distraction and drain on resources that could be put to better use. It's a refrain oft heard through my own career of over twenty years.

And yet, I know that if we care about quality and repeatable performance, we must know it is not achievable without the record. If we care about integrity in business, we must acknowledge that it is not discernible without the records. If we care about transparency in governance, we must demand authentic, realible records as evidence.

Those who claim that they are too busy doing "the real job" to ensure adequate record-keeping, in fact, are not actually finishing the job.

The failure to create and effectively use captured knowledge as a guide for action, basis for evaluation and means to defend decisions is a choice to abandon good management.

Knowingly or not, it's a choice too many have made. The results speak for themselves.