Why is Records Management still relevant? Litigation. E-discovery.

Sure Google can search and find all the relevant stuff if you're search terms are correct. But then you have to pay paralegals ($) or Lawyers ($$$) to find out what is relevant.

I heard a couple of items in a presentation sometime in the last 2 months, but can't remember where (found them on a scrap of paper in a sports coat pocket).

Information is an asset unless you don’t know where it is….then it is a liability.

Storage is the cheapest thing a company can buy….but it has the most liability.

Doug, I happen to agree with you. Playing devil's advocate though. How do you make the argument to overcome corporate inertia to
1. treat information as the crucial asset it is.
2. not do the cheapest and easiest thing -- just store it
3. After all, what are the odds that I'm gonna get sued

And not make that argument in a way that most folks in this community get, but the rest of the world. Sometimes, it kinda feels like we're preaching to the choir on this one.

For ERM there are two types of ROI:

1) Return on investment
2) Risk of incarceration

The only way people will truly embrace ERM is when they get completely destroyed in a court a few times. Normally, large organizations take a few times to learn and make the necessary changes to fix things. The Google approach can work, especially for the SMB market. If anyone can make a case why the donut shop nextdoor needs anything more, I'll pay you $1.

There's a reason why Google is in trouble right now for collecting information off of unsecured routers while taking street level pictures for Google Maps. They may be stating that it was a mistake but it is COMPLETELY in line with the corporate mantra. Maybe if I had Google's money I'd keep everything too, but the fact is, companies smaller than Google need to pick and choose what content is useful and should be kept, and what content isn't and shouldn't.

So Google will continue to learn the hard way. If I ran a donut shop on the corner I wouldn’t worry too much about the control of my records as long as my IRS filings are correct. Since major corporations average 103 active litigations at any moment (and they are becoming multinational), you work at managing your records just like any other asset. The savings on the litigation process alone are huge.

Brian - I agree that we in this community do get it for the most part.

Maybe one way to approach the argument is from the standpoint that if you do get rid of information once it is past its legal and useful life, you are decreasing the size of the digital haystack that has to be searched, demonstrating that search returns more relevant results (or at least less irrelevant results) when there is less information to cull through. Most people I know don't know how to refine or use advanced search to narrow down results, but they despise the astronomical hits that they get from Google or similar text-based searches.

It is a harder sell when you don't try to approach it from the legal and compliance angle, since cloud computing leads people to believe these big containers for their data just exist for them to use.

When I was an IT manager before I got into ECM, we used to sell management on the idea of cleaning up their digital "landfills" because while it cost $1 per megabyte to acquire more storage, it costs $3-8 per megabyte to manage it (DR, Backups, System Admins, etc.) I know storage has gotten cheaper to manage since those statistics were first published.

I agree that it is hard to sell people on not keeping it all without the legal hammer.

@Daniel

The doughnut shop has employees. The doughnut shop has employee information. The doughnut shop needs to get rid of said information when legally permitted to do so.

You owe me $1 or a doughnut.

Well done sir, well done. :)

Nice.

Google is wrong in that everyone should just keep everything and that conveniently reflects that 1) Google still lives in the virtual tower and 2) Google doesn't have an answer to RM so the easy thing to do is convince people it isn't needed.

But the argument Google makes might, indeed, be accurate for some. Last week at the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform meeting, a Congresswoman slammed US businesses by saying that government wants to keep records while business wants to hide and get rid of records. By her logic, government should do no records management. From a legal risk-reward perspective there are some industries where a single bucket might make more fiscal sense. In the donut shop example, the odds of litigation are low and the types of litigation would be expected to be, say, simple trip and fall. Let's take a quick financial analysis to see if it makes sense:

A 20 person donut shop has a manager and part time manager. Email is limited, but personnel records are fairly common as people look to move from the realm of donut engineer to professional blogger. (Um, that may have been an editorial.). The managers each spend 30 minutes per week classifying all the info in accordance with the RM policies, so a total of 1 hour per week at, say $45/hr fully burdened. That is $2340 per year.

The average donut shop gets sued once every ten years for a slip and fall case. Average settlement is $10,000 and (just to make it interesting) the insurance companies pays 80%. (In reality the insurance company would pay 100%.). The discovery costs are $4,000. So that means that every ten years the donut shoo pays $6,000 in legal costs, or $600 year. That is far less than the cost to do RM. In that scenario, the economic decision probably would be to not do any RM and instead just throw documents away after seven years.

Now, not every group has a hole in their liability like the donut shop (I couldn't resist). A company that makes nuclear power reactor bottles, for example, has a much higher liability. Their economics would likely swing the it her way.

So is Google right? Sometimes. Those of us in the RM industry would be wise to acknowledge that sometimes we may be taking RM too far. Our industry can be just as self-serving as Google at times when it comes to making blanket pronouncements.

However, in most situations RM has benefits that extend well beyond the legal costs. A bigger analysis for most operations invariably shows economic benefits that don't need legal for justification.

Agree different industries have different potential of risk. That is why the regulations governing a nuclear plant have very long retention times, while if you make toilet paper, regulations are pretty non-existent for the product. You base your retention times on these regulations/laws/risks. I'm sure we can have a lot of good humor on using the words congress and logic together but the congresswoman needs to stop and think, how much does she want to pay for toilet paper or a donut as all the costs have to be built in. The government doesn’t keep everything forever either. I don’t believe you’ll find many office supply requisitions from the 1930’s.

How about being able to avoid the costs of discovery altogether. If your RM policy is clear and consistent and you get a FOYA request for information that according to your policy has been destroyed correctly you can answer that FOYA with we don't have it.

This is perfectly legal and acceptable if your RM policy is clear and consistently followed.

I believe that records management is still relevant, simply stated it does a lot more than just manage records by a retention schedule. Records management should be an operational program within the company, just like the HR groups etc. I'm in the Masters program at Bay Path College in Longmeadow MA. It is the Masters in Communications & Information Mangement. This semester, I am taking a class called Legal Issues in Communications & Information Mangement. A very interesting course.

One of our discussion boards dealt with the questions: "Why do companies need a document creation, retention and destruction policy? How does having a well defined policy in place assist companies during litigation, particularly with electronic discovery requests? What are the risks of having no such policy in place?"

My answer to the first two questions follows:

"Companies need a document, retention and destruction policy to help manage the records and information that are needed to run the business. A well defined records and information management (RIM) program is part of the "business as usual" for a company and not a program to implement at the end of the life cycle of a document (i.e. it is no longer needed.)

A RIM program can do the following for a company:

* help locate where documents and information are
* Help to identify meta data of a document -- author, create date, last modified date, who modified it. etc
* identify how long to keep the information by defining retention schedules that are based on legal, administrative and historical needs
* identify records and information needed in a dispute and help to apply legal holds on these documents
* Have a documented process for destroying records which allows for the systematic destruction of records and not selected records destruction
* Provide governance and policies

A well defined policy helps the litigation team by being able to locate records and information, providing a point of contact for the litigation team and possibly a person to be disposed of concerning the records program of the company. (My boss recently was disposed over a 6 hour period on the subject)."

Sure Google has the ability to search and find every document needed, but at what cost? A well run program can help mitigate the costs of litigation or of regulatory exams if you are in the financial industries. Its almost like the Visa commercials: Cost of lawyer $500/hour, cost of production of documents millions of dollars, cost of having a well defined RIM program: Priceless.

Meg

I believe that we need to move beyond using the legislation/litigation big-stick as a means of convincing organisations that they need to manage their information/records. I am becoming more convinced that we need to look towards the reasons why people create and keep records for their own purpose - making their job easier and more accountable to their boss (or read shareholders). If we start looking at the business processes and how the records support that process then there will be logical times when records are created, kept and disposed of - all we need to do then is ensure that when the user/owner doesn't need the records anaymore they are disposed of and that disposal also adheres to legislative requirements.