There were several thoughtful responses to the post on information hoarding. What about the attorney at the recent American Bar Association conference that John Isaza told us about? This panelist stated that he no longer recommends record retention programs to his clients because all efforts to date have been expensive failures and advocates a Google-based approach to finding information. Posters to this AIIM blog generally thought he was uninformed and just plain wrong!
Karen Stanley was reminded of a client in which one attorney wanted to keep records for as long as possible "in case we get sued". The other attorney, who was a litigator, wanted to keep retention periods as short as possible "in case we get sued."
So if it’s not information hoarding, what is the best practice for managing retention?
Simplicity has an important role: Wayne Hoff – “I think that we need to apply a little more simplicity to the traditional models, which tend to be very complex, and implement policies and procedures that a) fit the organization and b) make it easy for users to comply with.”
Technology has an important role: John Bellegarde – “With products like Active Navigation, one can embrace a program of regular content cleanup! Eliminate the duplicates, the junk and leakage from the Records or ECM solution. Use technology to clean up after the records process and even reorganize the file systems into something useful.”
Other posts added important points about governance and change management. Most importantly, we have evidence that at least one organization is saving money by disposing of records with expired retention periods and ROT (Redundant, Trivial, and Obsolete) information:
Randy Moeller – “We had one group eliminate over $1M off their budget charges by cleaning out their team spaces over a 3 day period. It can work and be accepted by employees as the right thing to do.” “Almost all of our backup tapes are rotated after 32 days.”
We need more evidence that disposal of unnecessary information has tangible benefits. What success stories can you share?
#electronic records management
#ElectronicRecordsManagement #informationmanagement