I have read a couple of interesting blog posts over the last few weeks and have been meaning to post some thoughts about them.  Other priorities came into the picture and I forgot about the new blog posts.  Something else happened that led me back to one of the blogs and caused me to remember I had neglected to write about them.  I'm going to do it while it is fresh in my mind.

The first blog post was from Julie Colgan in the AIIM ERM Community Expert Blogs area.  In her blog post "Retention needs an Enema", Julie talked about how retention schedules that were created when records were primarily in a paper format were very granular in nature.  Many thought that level of granularity was a real aide to finding the content later.  But in the current day with so many records in electronic format and a lot of technology existing to help find the content, the level of granularity in the retention schedule is no longer necessary.  Julie points out that this has relegated the retention schedule to find its value largely as a compliance tool, but this is hardly what most companies need today.  They want to put their hands on the right content at the right time to help the business in areas such as timely decision-making.

Julie continues discussing how this evolved the retention schedule to grouping records into bigger buckets so it would be easier for the average employee to use in filing their records.  But in her experience and mine as well, users can still mess up in placing the content in the right bucket, increasing the risk to the organization because they may be holding records too long.

Julie proposes it's time for a big innovation in retention schedules.  I agree with her.  The rate at which content is being created is too great for employees to deal with classifying it as records or categorizing it for future findability.  Julie brings up the idea of content analytics being something that could help in this area.  Auto classification tools have had about an 80-90 percent success rate in classifying content correctly in the past, but the technology continues to improve.  The hoopla about the computer Watson from IBM on the Jeopardy show has proven there are more possibilities in that area.  Steve Bailey touched on some of the possibilities in his book, Managing the Crowd - Rethinking records management for the Web 2.0 world.  He brought up the idea of crowd sourcing and tagging to aid in the classification of records in his book.

Like Julie, I don't have all the answers either.  But the pace at which new content is being created along with the new ways that content is being created (Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, etc.) is going to require we rethink the retention schedule and how it can be used practically in business today.

So that brings me to the other side of retention and that is declaration of records.  Chris Walker had a recent blog post titled Records Matter, Declaration Doesn't.  Chris states that when thinking about electronic records, "formally declaring a piece of electronic content as a record is antiquated, artificial, and unnecessary."  I tend to agree with the stance that Chris is taking.

Chris says we can argue that all business content qualifies as a record by virtue of it being business content.  If we accept the argument, then we have eliminated the distinction between record and non-record and more importantly, life is a lot easier for the average end-user because they no longer have to make this decision.

This was the approach we used in the Enterprise Content and Records Management (ECRM) System at a former employer.  We worked with the users in understanding the content types that they created as part of their business processes.  We then mapped these to the retention schedule to ensure all content had a retention period assigned to it.  We then created the folders for these various content types for users to store their content in, with appropriate retention in the background and inherited to the individual content as it was added.

For instance, many groups had contracts that they initiated or received.  Users stored all their contracts (draft, final or otherwise) in these folders (some further sub-divided by parties or types of contracts, but that was their choice).  The users didn't have to declare records as they created them.  All the users needed to do was make sure they put all contracts in the correct folder.  It was more usable from their standpoint - they certainly understood the type of content based on the business process.  It was a much simpler process than deciding whether it is a record or not.

Was it possible that we saved drafts or other copies longer than necessary?  Was their some risk in keeping all the drafts?  Possibly.  But we were more concerned with making sure all content related to a business process was in one place and retained for as long as was required.  And we didn't want to overburden our users with declaring records.  If we inflicted that on our users, they would simply store everything on their local drives and we would have chaos.

What are your thoughts in these two areas?  They certainly have the potential to make it easier to manage content, particularly when the rate of growth continues to be high.  Records and Information Managers need to think about new ways of working so the end-users can concentrate on what the business needs them to do.