“Setting the Stage for Automatic Disposition” is the topic for my educational session at the ARMA Conference in San Diego Oct. 26-28. Organizations invest significant human and financial resources in developing and updating record retention schedules. What I don’t see is a follow-up effort to implement the retention schedule. In a recent project SMEs asked, “What’s the point of updating the retention schedule if retention is not being implemented, and documents are not disposed?” Clearly there are barriers to systematic disposition, and I think the people-process-technology model is helpful in classifying the barriers: People – In-house lawyers are leery of destroying records, even when retention periods have been satisfied
It’s hard enough to maintain an up-to-date approved retention schedule, but the barriers to systematic implementation of the schedule are also challenging
@richarddoculabs Defensible disposition addresses the problem of over-retention -- organizations have been over-retaining electronic information and failing to dispose of it in a legally defensible manner when business and law will allow. The best way to address this monster problem is to break it into more tractable sub-problems: day-forward information disposition and historical informational disposition
Retention Basics Still Apply to Cloud The cloud is simply another option for the storage of your records, and as such, the same basic retention requirements apply
The records management functionality often is not in place to apply all of the retention rules and the event dates to the records to enable disposition
Activity Timing Business Objective Preservation “Pre-trigger” – Prior to a discovery event as a normal course of business Ensure the proper materials are retained only as long as required or needed Suspend Disposition “Post-trigger” – As a result of a discovery event or legal hold Ensure materials under legal hold are not destroyed But for those firms that do dispose of content in a systematic manner, preservation now becomes a process of suspending disposition
I suspect that a large part of the issue is that classification models are too granular and too tightly coupled to the retention schedule. I’ve been involved in a couple of projects where this was the case
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Recently, Doculabs completed a consulting engagement with a client in the financial services industry that was focused on the retention and disposition of “social” content in light of the FINRA and SEC regulations (see my previous blog posts for a discussion of the guidelines)
It protects the integrity of the content and associated metadata. Defensible Disposition & Legal Holds enables organizations to dispose of content when it has satisfied its retention requirements in the normal course of business. Should a lawsuit arise, the retention period can be suspended to insure the content is not destroyed. The disposition process is completely automated. Organizations import its document retention schedule into a workflow and rely on the software to do the rest. When a piece of content is eligible for disposition, the Records Manager (or appointed equivalent) will receive an email alert prompting them to take action
I'm noticing a shift in the discussion from the initial states in the information lifecycle (creation and retention) to the final state (disposition). Maybe we've reached the tipping point, and organizations are beginning to direct their attention to getting rid of electronic records whose retention periods will expire soon/have expired. I conducted a brief survey (December 13-15) to explore current practices for disposing of records whose retention periods have been satisfied