Crisis? Whose Crisis?

In a couple of recent blog posts, Steve Bailey adopted his familiar role of agent provocateur, and succeeded in generating a flurry of discussion around the proposition that RM may be coming to the end of the line as a profession in its own right.

"The message [of the Dacre Review] seems pretty clear to me. The capture, management and maintenance of electronic records should now be considered an IT function, integrated within the mainstream of IT service delivery. … we have effectively allowed ourselves to be increasingly marginalized over recent years whilst the game moves on and upwards without us.

So, Records Managers, its time to open the office door, walk down the corridor to the Head of IT and pass the baton marked 'Records Management' over to him or her to deal with and for us to return to our warehouses full of paper and hanging files...”

But would we have found the Head of IT in their office down the corridor, or might they have been away on a mission to resolve their own professional existential angst? A news item in Ars Technica highlights a recent event to launch the ‘IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF)’:

"The event was a snapshot of a discipline in transition, and the assembled participants were trying to take charge of that transition in order to improve the status of IT while still retaining its identity as a coherent discipline. It's not clear to me that the latter is actually possible, but Microsoft, Intel, Chevron, BP, and the rest of the members of the Innovation Value Institute plan to try."

The introduction to this news item tells us that “IT is the ultimate thankless job”. But wait a minute – isn’t that our line? Aren’t IT the ones with the ‘Access All Areas’ passes to the Executive Suite, pouring their seductive ‘solutions’ into the ears of management, while records managers hang about forlornly on the outside, misunderstood and undervalued?

Whether either or both of these professions are facing a real identity crisis is a moot point, but it might help us to understand where IT is coming from – and to drop the not uncommon RM defensiveness and resentment in the face of its ‘favoured’ status – if we recognize that they, too, are assailed by some of the same fears and worries that beset us. We decry the ‘quick fixes’ offered by IT in place of robust RIM systems: but what if that is all they felt they could sell, that the real (subtle, complex, elegant, holistic) solutions they truly favoured would fall on deaf ears?

I don’t want to minimize the extent to which power imbalances within organizations are real rather than the results of selective perception (or even paranoia); still, it’s easier to get a clear view at eye level when the disciplinary drawbridges are lowered and the border guards taken off duty.

Records professionals do need to make that trip down the corridor to the Head of IT, but without the relay-runner’s baton. Instead, bring some tea and biscuits, and a willingness to discuss mutual strategies in the light not just of our own fears and anxieties but those of other constituencies within our organization as well. And it seems that the first step in walking that necessary mile in another's shoes shouldn’t be a difficult one to take – just turn and look in the mirror.