Last week I met up with a former CIO of a local council in Queensland. We’ve done work together on-and-off over a number of years, and he’d recently moved into a new job in Sydney. He shared a number of stories about the work they’d been doing up in Queensland, and this one really stood out:

Like many organisations, the Council had a flood of snail mail letters coming in and going out, all of which needed to be scanned and saved into the records management system (EDRMS). The goal: eliminate 90% of the physical letters going out, replacing them with emails, also saved into the EDRMS.

Now, as he put it, recordkeepers can tend to be a bit, well, shy. Not normally best suited for going out and talking with people.

So he sent the entire recordkeeping team on an eight week Toastmasters course. With their new found confidence, he sent them out into the organisation to talk to people one-on-one. They visited everyone who routinely sent out printed mail, explained to them the benefits of replacing this with email, and showed them how to use the systems.

The result: mission accomplished. A huge drop in snail mail, and big increases in productivity for all involved.

I love this for many reasons. It’s simple, achieving a corporate objective without fanfare, one person at a time. It recognises the human side, both for the recordkeeping team and general staff. It’s thinking out of the box, not afraid to stray outside of traditional technology, training or policy approaches. It also gives the recordkeeping team skills for life, and shows them respect.

Have you seen something similar?