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Big Bucket Approach – How's The View?

By Susan Cisco posted 11-24-2010 22:45

  

 

Fewer retention category choices (due to bigger, fewer retention buckets) in a retention schedule can lead to more consistent records management compliance as long as the risks of potentially longer retention periods are taken into account. Big bucket retention schedules (100-150 record series/retention categories for an enterprise) are more cost effective to maintain and increase filing accuracy for both manual and automatic classification. They also make training more efficient for anyone who has to implement retention policies in ECRM systems such as IT, RM, records coordinators, information champions, or SharePoint TeamSite and site collection owners.

Big Bucket Macro View– For years, I’ve been focused on the macro view of the Big Bucket Approach: http://tinyurl.com/36kkgr7. For example, we helped a client reduce its 25-year old retention schedule from more than 9,500 retention categories to 136. At the recent ARMA Conference we learned that KBR streamlined its schedule from 251 records series to 44. Both organizations are building a governance framework that simplifies compliance with legal and regulatory requirements for retention of records and other business information.  These are examples of the macro view of the Big Bucket Approach.

Big Bucket Micro View – Currently, I’m working with a large corporation that is implementing its streamlined retention schedule across the entire enterprise. I commented to 30-year ECRM veteran, Mike Alsup http://aiimcommunities.org/users/malsup, that I noticed that the total number of categories in the schedule were increasing as discussions progressed with groups, departments, and business units to determine mapping of retention in the ECRM system and discuss required metadata. Example – high volume type of record with a legal retention period of 6 months was co-mingled in a category with records with 6-year retention periods. Dividing the single bucket with 6 year retention into 2 new buckets with 6 month and 6 year retention periods will save storage costs and reduce unnecessary exposure as high volume records will not be retained an extra 5.5 years. Mike called this the micro view of the Big Bucket Approach.

Lesson Learned – The process of right-sizing retention categories during ECRM system implementation might increase retention categories and that’s OK because the big bucket micro view expects refinements to occur when retention is applied in ECRM systems. A more holistic picture of retention management then is to simplify retention schedules at the beginning of the retention schedule update/refresh cycle and to refine the retention categories to suit roles, business processes, and workflows during implementation of the updated retention schedule.



#retentionschedules #ElectronicRecordsManagement #electronic records management #Records-Management
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