Dr. Stephen Covey reminded us that “important” is not the same thing as “urgent.” Records retention reminds us that important is not the same thing as exciting. I get it – records retention schedules are boring. But the fact remains that literally thousands of records retention requirements apply to your organization’s information. I know, because my firm finds and tracks these laws as part of our decades of retention schedule work for clients across industries. And your regulators expect you to know them too.
Records retention requirements generally apply to information’s content, regardless of the information’s medium – electronic data, paper, you name it. The requirements are scattered across the federal and 50 states’ statutory and regulatory codes, often with unusual retention mandates. Here are just a few:
Continue Reading Why govern our information? Reason #11: Thousands of federal and state records retention laws apply to your company
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OK, IT mavens, listen up…how much better would your life be if you only had to manage and protect 20% of your company’s data? By eliminating 80% of your data you could free up oodles of storage, reduce licensing costs, shorten backup cycles, and drastically cut e-discovery preservation costs, not to mention go home on time for a change. For most this is an unrealistic pipe dream, but it doesn’t need to be. The trick is knowing which 20% to manage.
It lingers on – that vaguely guilty feeling that there’s something sanctionable, even illegal, about routinely destroying business data. That’s nonsense. It is well-settled United States law that a company may indeed dispose of business data, if done in good faith, pursuant to a properly established, legally valid data retention schedule, and in the absence of an applicable litigation preservation duty.
As the information tide relentlessly rises, many organizations simply see an IT problem, to be fixed with a purely IT solution – more storage capacity, more tools, or both. But merely adding more storage is a reaction, not a strategy. And adding technology tools without the right governance rules invariably makes things worse, not better.
Retention schedules are essential in bringing order to a company’s complicated, chaotic information environment. Whether they succeed in doing so depends largely on whether they are structured properly. So, the age-old question is, what’s the best way to go – organizing the schedule by department/group, or by information content types?