Chris Schassler
Senior Director, FTI Consulting
3/23/2022
One of the often-overlooked challenges of electronic records management is the control and maintenance of retention policies. This is particularly difficult if you are faced with many different record series categories in your organization, which is increasingly the case for modern enterprises. When managed separately, organizations maintain a unique retention policy for each record type. If you have only a few different types of records to manage, this approach works well. However, it becomes more and more difficult as the volume of unique record types increases. Further, if your organization is required to manage permanent records that need to be archived to another organization, such as NARA (National Archives and Records Administration), additional challenges come into play.
Tracking and controlling hundreds of retention policies that are likely to change as regulations and other organizational and operational factors change can become unmanageable very quickly. The support and maintenance cost along with the compliance risk can significantly dilute ROI and leave you with processes and tools that fail to meet the goals for which they were designed.
Legal, compliance, IT and records management teams can address this issue and add efficiencies to the records management function by consolidating retention policies. This can simplify and reduce the overhead associated with managing dozens of policies across various record types. This can by done by grouping schedules together within your series according to their function or another applicable categorization scheme and their dispositions.
The following is an example of how this can be accomplished:
To understand what this may look like in practice, consider this illustration:
Using this example, basic consolidation steps would include:
Key when consolidating retention policies include:
This information is an example of how retention policies can be simplified, but in practice, it is best to customize policies and processes according to your organization’s unique needs and risk profile. Make sure you have experts involved to avoid unexpected risks and oversights. The goal is to reduce overhead while minimizing data risk and maintaining compliance. Given that electronic records management solutions are significant investments, and the growing impact of complex privacy and data governance laws, it’s critical to protect your organizations with a solid and sustainable design.
The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of FTI Consulting, its management, its subsidiaries, its affiliates, or its other professionals.
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