Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries. We talk about how we can apply these solutions to your company.
Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious to hear about information management challenges like email management, retention management, or asset data management, this podcast is for you. This is Lee, and in this episode, Mora and I will take a journey through time. From ancient empires to modern enterprises.
We'll explore how the earliest record keeping practices laid the foundation for today's governance principles.
That was a mouthful, Maura, but a journey through time, that sounds good.
Take us back, Mora.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: I'm starting.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: You just want me to start? Because you know how much I love to talk about the Sumerians.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: The King of Ur, who was originally the record keeper and when he became king, wanted to keep his job as record keeper too, because he recognized the importance of tracking things.
Transparency, accountability, consistency, agreement, shared understanding, all encapsulated in a written form.
Some sort of written form. It doesn't need to be. Today we mostly use electronic information.
We mostly have even electronic signatures on contracts. We have emails that track everything, or Slack or team messages, or even text that show the history of what happened. Here's the story of what happened. It's all done in text.
In fact, there are some books out there, some fiction books, some silly fiction books even. There is one that I read that was all about the group chat of bridesmaids before a wedding. And it shows the whole story of how not only did the wedding come together and all the events leading up to it, but some friendship drama that played out in the course of it. And that's something that you live every day. Well, those are records. You've created a record.
Is it an important record?
Could be. I don't know, could be the only place that's recorded the, you know, the horrible insult that the maid of honor gave to the bride the day before the wedding. And that explains why they hadn't speak again for 35 years.
It could be the.
I don't remember if that happened in the book, but my point is that we live with records every day. People screenshot text messages to prove to somebody else, look, this is what happened. This is a crazy thing they said. Or to prove it to the person who said it because they forgot. Or I ordered a car service to pick me up one time and told them to please come to X address because I was dropping off my other car at the shop before I went to the airport. And the driver wrote back okay to when I gave him the time and the place. And then he didn't come there. He came to my house. I was like, look, you said you were coming to here where I told you to come. And he claimed not to remember and I couldn't leave the car. But the point is, there are records. They're ephemeral in many cases.
I know you wanted to start with the ancient history, but I jumped right into today.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Right. Common era and before Common Era. I was thinking we could split the difference, but. Okay, keep going. It's good.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: No, no, we can go back because these principles aren't new. It's not just the ability to capture a screenshot of a series of text messages. We didn't suddenly discover the need to prove something. We didn't suddenly discover the need to document something. We, when we had screenshotted text messages. It's been happening since hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. It's been happening since the.
What did you come up with? The code of Hammurabi.
And my favorite, of course, the Sumerians and their clay tablet envelopes around their clay tablet contracts that were not only we wrote the original contract and both parties signed it, but we put the envelope over it. Another slip of clay that had the same information and the same signatures so that you could prevent fraud.
That was thousands of years ago.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: That 3200 before Common Era. 3200 before Common Era to track trade laws and taxes.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Yeah, 5000 something.
5000, I don't know, 5000 something years ago that humans needed to be able to come to a shared understanding and document it and have a way to preserve that understanding and agreement and prove it. So you have right there all the principles that we're looking at. Records are capable of being recorded. They are documentation or evidence of a transaction or an agreement or a decision.
And they are reliable, accountable, transparent, in that case, unalterable. And we have some principles of unalterability in some of our record keeping requirements today, but we certainly have all those other ones. How do you know you can rely on a record? And it's about the process that creates the record. It's about the shared understanding. It's about documenting and providing evidence of decisions, actions, transactions, even policies and procedures in an organization end up being records of how the organization works. And all of that's been going on since people started. Started having, having really society is when it started, right?
[00:06:23] Speaker A: I believe so. I mean, you had the earliest form was probably stories, right? Just passing down traditional stories and folklore and stuff. I mean, that was a way of. Of recording the past and what would happen as well.
So I mean, as long as people talk, as long as people were able to communicate, there was a way to create a record.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Well, and even, even in the more recent past, I know that when we were working with the native Alaskan tribe, the Tlingit Haida, that was a non written language.
And the story of the tribe was captured in the language itself and the way that it represented things.
I don't know which language it is.
I think some Alaskan language that has dozens of words for snow because each of the types of snow means something different for the community.
It's snow you can walk through, snow that might kill you. Snow that's good for the. You know, for melting and providing drinking water, whatever the. I don't know what those differences are. I'm just guessing, but I know that there are that because they have that as a huge part of their world.
They need all the different words.
Here, where I live, near the ocean, we don't have so many words for snow. We have snow squalls, we have nor', Easters, we have snow.
We don't need deserts because we don't have.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: In Chicago, we have slush.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: You're big on slush. Yes.
So we're not. So you have the. The words that make sense to describe the life you're living, the community you're living in.
And I think people.
People get. When we talk to people, when we talk to clients and potential clients, there's a lot of people who start out by saying, I don't have any records.
And you have to. We've had various clients who have said things along the lines of, well, if you don't have any records, then why am I paying you?
Not to us, but to their employees who said that if you're not doing anything, you have no records to demonstrate what you've done, do we need you? Which is extreme. It's an extreme reaction. But it's also an extreme statement to say, I don't have any records, My company doesn't have any records, our department doesn't have any records, because as people, we're doing actions and we are recording information about those actions in order to make sure that we get to the next step correctly, that we can trace it back if there's a mistake. I was balancing my checkbook yesterday and. And between the bank account and my accounts, there was a discrepancy. And it was the amount of two checks I was expecting to clear that I didn't think it cleared and the bank didn't think it cleared. But it was exactly that amount. And my suspicion was, since I balanced my checkbook the day before and it was fine, my suspicion was that in fact the bank had subtracted them. They just hadn't. It just wasn't being displayed yet.
So I waited one day. This morning, there they were. Now it's everything balanced again.
But if it wasn't, I would have to trace it back. What happened in my spreadsheet? Did I miss something? Did I forget to write down a transaction? Or what happened at the bank? Did they subtract something wrong? Or did I, did a check not get cashed? That something that I sent and didn't get through? Everyone does that every day and we don't think about it as record keeping.
So then when we come in to a client organization and we say tell me about your records, everybody clams freeze.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: Because they think we're the police and they think they have something to worry about and they really don't have anything to worry about. What we're looking for are the key documents that they create so that we could capture them and we can create a schedule that leads to when you should appropriately dispose of something.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Frequently that's the task we're assigned. Other times we're looking to help them make their process better. We've had a lot of clients who have asked us to help implement email management solutions or to write the policies around using a collaboration tool like SharePoint or Teams or Slack or Jira or something like that, or something more advanced, more sophisticated like a contract lifecycle management tool.
In all of those cases, the end goal is to make people's lives easier and to make sure that the company has the visibility and the access to the documents and data that it needs to a run the business efficiently and in some cases safely. If we're talking about an infrastructure organization that is responsible for, you know, power lines or pipelines or rail lines or something, so there's safe and efficient operations. That's the first reason a business creates records. The second reason is what are their obligations, what's the business obligations, what are their customers and partners and vendors obligations and how do you get to that shared, you know, meeting of the minds and make sure all the obligations are fulfilled.
Then there's reporting, reporting to regulatory agencies, reporting to tax authorities, reporting to shareholders, reporting to some, you know, customer agreements have audit and look back requirements built in and you have to Be able to report to your customers that this is what you did and this is how you did it.
So you're creating records in the course of doing your business and as a big part of doing your business.
So when we come, it's to make that better, it's not to, it's not to catch you in doing something wrong.
But it's just the word record, I think that throws people off.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: I agree.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: And I think it does that in a couple ways. Go ahead.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: Well, no, I agree. That's all I was saying. Go ahead.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Oh, so I was going to say I think the word record throws people off in two ways. One is the records police, like you said. I think the other is people think record equals paper.
And that is not true. That is absolutely not true today. But it really has not been true for 30 years.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Thirty years, yes. But it's been true since those clay tablets, since the Greek and Roman times, since the, the what the monks used to scribe manuscripts manually type of thing. I mean, that was paper, that was the record, right?
[00:13:31] Speaker B: Illuminated manuscripts. Yeah.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: So yes. And no, paper's been around a couple hundred years.
Before that, the stone tablets, the clay tablets, there was something very permanent about a stone tablet or a clay tablet. There's no getting away from that.
So if something gets carved into stone, that feels like, okay, okay, I understand, that's an important thing. I can't just get rid of that. I can't ignore it. I can't get rid of it.
Paper started out similarly because it was so hard to produce, it was so expensive. Those monks spent a lot of time doing those ill illustrated manuscripts. So again, it was treated sort of reverentially because, not just because it was the monks, but because the paper cost so much.
In the US government, the Federal Records act in the early 20th century was the first time that federal records were allowed to be destroyed.
Before that, the assumption was if you spent the time and the money to write something down, you kept it.
So now here we are and we can't hold onto our data. It's all magic.
It's ones and zeros in the cloud.
So it doesn't feel as important.
And so when you talk about records in this information age, in the electronic age, in the cloud based era, whatever the next name is for where we're living and you know, the network, it's harder for people to see those as records and yet we use them every day.
So I think that's a good place to stop for this one and then we'll pick it up again in the next episode and talk about.
Okay, what does that mean now, where are we today with this?
Can't grab it. Still need it.
What do we do?
[00:15:33] Speaker A: All right. Sounds good.
Yeah. What's my closing?
[00:15:43] Speaker B: I'm going to say, so tune in next time to hear what happens next. And thank you for tuning in this time. Don't forget to like and share.
Tell people about our podcast on your social media and with your network of champions.
And thank you to Jason Blake for our music.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Excellent.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: What counts?
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Send us an email at info@info trailblazer.us.com or look us up on the Trailblazer Academy. Right. Trailblazer learningacademy.com look up our courses.
As always, we appreciate you.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: New place to find our information.
The listeners, a whole new place to find our information.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Okay.
