Before a NAGARA webinar I moderated on August 6, someone on the call mentioned, in passing, that they lived in a place called Box Elder. I distractedly asked what that was. I genuinely thought maybe the town was named after an elder named Box (I know, don't judge). Turns out a box elder is a place, a tree, and a bug, all at once, and I knew none of that until a webinar attendee told me before we'd even started recording.
It was a small, ridiculous moment, but it's stuck with me, because it's a pretty good stand-in for how records and information management (RIM) gets seen by leadership and the rest of the business. People know the field exists. Ask them what it actually does for the organization, and you'll get something vague, inaccurate, or nothing at all. There's awareness without understanding, a name everyone's heard attached to a value nobody can quite articulate.
At the NAGARA Annual Conference in Philadelphia, July 21-24, Alan Pelz-Sharpe of Deep Analysis and I co-presented a session on benchmarking AI readiness in RIM. We didn't spend any time convincing that audience that RIM is essential to AI readiness. Alan wrote about the session afterward.The people in that room, he said, knew with absolute certainty that any AI project built on a shaky information foundation is headed for failure, and they can't get anyone in leadership to listen.
The people doing the work know exactly what's at stake. The people funding the work don't have the vocabulary for why it matters. They know the phrase "records and information management," but they don't know what it means, kind of like how I knew the words "box elder" without being able to define them.
That gap has a real cost. What I found at the conference was a room full of RIM professionals who love their work but also struggle to stay motivated, and who often feel underappreciated and overworked.
At another session, Alexandra Cardaropoli, who talked about using Bitmoji to make records training less painful, called RIM "a thankless job" that she loves anyway. In a separate conversation, another speaker, Jenny Alexander, was more blunt: RIM professionals are "engaged or burnt out, there's no in between." Nobody throws a parade because your retention schedule is defensible. You mostly hear about this work when something goes wrong.
So what actually improves understanding of RIM?
Start by explaining the why. Jeremy Bartee and Emma Rose Powers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory turned a rough federal audit into the foundation of a RIM framework that's since held up under two more audits. Their advice was to explain the why and the impact if you want support.
That alone doesn't create organizational value, though. Good intentions and hard-earned lessons from an audit don't change how leadership sees the field unless someone connects them to outcomes leadership already cares about.
That's the point Alan and I built our NAGARA session around: in the AI era, AI data readiness comes down to five things, and none of them are new to anyone who's built a program to CIP-level standards.
AI data readiness spans five domains, and they should look familiar to any RIM professional:
That last one matters enough that it got its own section in AIIM's Organizational Readiness Assessment for AI whitepaper, written by AIIM Fellow Rob Bogue, CIP.
Those five domains map closely onto what AIIM's CIP body of knowledge has been teaching for years. RIM professionals aren't short on expertise. They're short on a way to translate that expertise into a story a CFO or a CEO will act on. "We have good governance" doesn't land in a budget meeting. "Our AI pilot will fail without clean, accessible, well-governed data, and here's what that costs us if we skip it" does.
Dr. Andrew Davenport of Monticello gave the luncheon keynote at the NAGARA Conference and made a point that's bigger than records management but fits it anyway: citizen is the highest office in the land, and holding that office means sitting across from people who disagree with you and staying in the conversation. "We don't do it because it's easy," he said. "We do it because it's hard." That's true of democracy, and it's true of building an information governance program nobody asked for but everybody eventually needs.
So back to the box elder. It's a word with several meanings, easy to misunderstand, kind of like RIM. Our job is to stop letting other people define what RIM is and start being proactive about it ourselves. Managing and governing information isn't the whole job. Educating people about the value of that work, and tying it to strategy and business outcomes, is just as much a part of it.