“This house is a junkyard!; too much unwanted stuff everywhere”, lamented my wife the other day. I can’t find fault with her observation as often I too was surprised at the amount of things we accumulated over the years. We have been living in this house for the past 12 years. We did a couple of rounds of summer cleaning drives. But we still have too much junk!

Well, the problem is that we surely didn’t know what to keep and what to throw away. We didn’t even know the reason why we were keeping things. For example, I have the boxes of all the mobile phones I bought in the past 12 years, even though I don’t have those old phones anymore! Whenever I bought a new cell phone, I kept the box because of its novelty value and the extreme self satisfaction that box provided me when I looked at my newest possession and its container! Over a period of time I got used to the phones while the boxes lie somewhere in an obscure corner of one of the cabinets.

The situation is the same with documents. All my credit card statements went into some folder in one of the drawers. All utility bills, invites, invoices, bills, and receipts ended up in some drawer in one of the rooms. 12 years later I finally realized that I have a huge junk problem! I can’t throw these things out now because I don’t know what is important and what is not. At the same time I cannot ignore this problem because I no longer have space in the house to accumulate more junk! The only option is to go through every piece of article as well as document and evaluate its importance in my life. It might take weeks or months, but I have to bite the bullet and get my house in order!

Now let’s look at an enterprise. If I as an individual can accumulate so much junk, look at the potential of a large organization in the junk accumulation race. The problem organizations are experiencing now is that no user would want to throw away any piece of information or be responsible for information destruction. Businesses create unrealistic estimates of the importance of their information and documents. They ideally want to keep everything without understanding where such practices will lead them in the long run. Electronic storage is cheap, but the labor to find a piece of information from a huge pile is not. And that is precisely why organizations should invest in a records management initiative.

Records management is often misunderstood as a technology solution, which it simply is not. Of course, technology can help and automate certain aspects, but the focus should be on the policies and guidelines. The three most important aspects of records management are:

1.  What is important?
2. How long it is important?
3. What happens when it is no longer important?

 What is important?

This is the first point of failure for most of us – individuals or organizations. We fail in assessing what is important to us and what is not. We need to make a decision as to how important a grocery bill is or a used bus ticket is before deciding to push them into a folder. Similarly we need to look at every document or article in hand before deciding to store them. We need to keep only those with a future value, and all others should go into the trash can at the earliest possible moment. There should be a valid reason as to why we keep what we decide to keep. Anything that we keep because it has a valid future value is called a Record. In my case the cellphone is a record where as the box is not and so the box should have ideally gone to the  trash can on day one!

 How long it is important?

Most of the records have a life span. Your cell phone is good for a couple of years or till it becomes obsolete in your observation. Once the importance (rather utility) is exhausted it should be disposed off. The utility bills or credit card statements could be kept for a limited period of time before they are shredded. Similarly if we look carefully at all the records, we should be able to identify the time periods for which these are important to us. This time period is often referred to as the Retention Period. In any records management initiative, it is essential to understand the retention period of each of the records that we keep.

In an enterprise scenario it may not be easy to identify the retention periods of each of the records individually. So we need to group records into categories and identify the retention periods for the record categories. Categorization can be at multiple levels: you can have categories and multiple levels of sub-categories under them. Managing retention periods at the category levels could be easier than managing them at the record level.

Some records may have a perpetual retention period. Your birth certificate or educational credentials will be valid throughout your life (and may be even beyond that). Such records are called Vital Records. Only the vital records should be kept forever.

 What happens when a record is no longer important?

The answer is quite simple. It should simply be disposed off. Disposal could be destruction or simply taking it out of your control. A cell phone can be sold off once its utility is over or it can be trashed/recycled. Documents that are no longer important can be shredded.

The concept is fairly simple, but real life situations are not. For example the retention period may not be carved in stone on day one, and might require periodic monitoring. Based on changes to compliance regulations, retention and disposals might change over a period of time. Sometimes a legal complication might arise when you are about to dispose a document.  So records management initiative should be sensitive to all such changes and adjust the process accordingly.

Modern records management solutions provide capabilities to dynamically adjust to the evolving practices and procedures. They provide the users with the abilities to manage disposition schedules, file documents based on well defined filing plans, and place holds on documents in case there are legal or other requirements. Such details are fodder for another post in the near future.