Practical Advice on Retention Management
I was reading through the electronic version of AIIM’s eDoc Magazine earlier this week - it’s a valuable source of information with great articles and contributors. The latest issue has a lot of articles dealing with the issue of records management and, more broadly, retention management. The one thing missing, though, is a tutorial on how to create and implement a truly workable retention policy.
Now, implementing a records management strategy is difficult work - that’s why the RM consultants can charge the big $$ for their services. The reality is that traditional RM frameworks don’t work well in the world of digital information - the days of the 5,000+ category file plan are over (at least they should be). And yet, many organizations continue down the path of complicated retention schemes that prove to be impossible to actually enforce in any kind of automated or consistent manner. I remember a conversation with a company that spent million of dollars and 3 full years trying to come up with a records management scheme that would work. At the end of three years, the company gave up - the project had gone too deep and tried to boil the ocean. The results were sunk costs and an over-collection problem for eDiscovery (because the solution, when nothing else worked, was to keep everything).
With all the concern around eDiscovery, organizations need a practical way to conduct retention management that can be implemented quickly and successfully, and that has the flexibility to evolve. One methodology that I’ve seen work is to institute role-based retention. Most legal folks I talk to think this is a “reasonable” and “good faith” effort, and it can be straightforward for IT to implement. Roles can start off simple, e.g. executive team, finance, sales and retention can be set for each role. The beauty of the role-based retention strategy is that it is defensible, executable, and grow-able. Organizations can evolve their retention strategies to go beyond roles as necessary. For example, retention policies could start off as “5 years for all finance-related documents” and evolve to “5 years for all finance-related documents created by director-level and higher employees and 1 year for all finance documents created by manager-level and lower employees.”
In my time as an analyst, more and more organizations chose archiving products as the first step in a role-based retention strategy. What these organizations wanted was a way to easily retain content with a solution that:
1. Doesn’t drive infrastructure costs sky high - after all, the volume of digital information grows exponentially (thus, disposition of unnecessary information is critical)
2. Meets any compliance regulations (e.g. can keep copies of everything if needed and keep them immutable)
3. Meets user access needs (allows for seamless access)
4. Allows for retention policy evolution
Be careful on #4 here. Many of the products in the archiving space are not able to easily allow re-classification of content as retention policies evolve and change. One of the things I’ve really liked about Mimosa NearPoint is that it can (while also meeting #’s 1-3 above).
If you’ve got questions about role-based retention and how to get an initiative off the ground, I’d be happy to help. Just ping me at bmurphy@mimosasystems.com
