Are you ready for AIIM 2013?  I’m packed, pumped and ready to head for New Orleans!  Come join our interactive discussion on Managing Electronic Records Cleanup on Thursday!

In Part 2 of our blog series, we discussed preparing for cleanup by defining how you want your information organized. We also recommended understanding your organization’s 5-year technology strategy, specifically the technology related to managing unstructured information (e.g., documents, email and web content).  I want to quickly mention one more preparation step: make sure you understand the security requirements associated with the information in your organization’s electronic file plans. While the department coordinators understand their business needs, don’t expect them to understand the complexities of applying compliance requirements, implementing a sustainable lifecycle management plan, or mitigating the risks associated with immature rights management plans as they define their file plans.

Now, what are the options for managing the cleanup of electronic records? There are several approaches that you can take:

1. I CAN DO IT MYSELF: Certainly, many organizations simply delegate the task to the departments who own the information.  Unfortunately, this is often done without completing the necessary preparation steps. Without a good plan, departmental cleanup efforts often reduce the well-organized information that is eligible for destruction but avoid the older or disorganized content that no one is sure about. Without a tool, this is a time consuming process, and business priorities justifiably win out.
2. The IT APPROACH: What I like to call the IT approach has been around since the old days of managing data on mainframe computer systems, when a megabyte was considered a lot of data.  This approach simply reviews your content based on the created and last modified dates and targets a list of older content for destruction.  The obvious compliance issues with this approach are often offset with an approval process that is typically manual and labor intensive for the business units or completed by IT and Legal without full disclosure to the owners of the information.
3. DATA DISCOVERY AND RECORDS MANAGEMENT TOOLS: There are many software tools that can help you analyze your shared drives and make the process of cleaning up your electronic information easier to manage and legally defensible.

Knowing which approach (and potentially which software) is best for you to use when cleaning up your information stockpile requires an understanding of your organization’s volume of stale information, the technology strategy and budget, and the amount of labor that will be available for implementation.  Whatever the decision might be, it needs to be made soon.

Come join our interactive discussion of options and tools at “Managing Electronic Records Cleanup” on March 21 (1:30pm) at AIIM 2013.  Click here to learn more.

I can’t wait!  See you on Thursday!

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Contributed by: Tina Teree Baker, President and CEO at Cadence Group

Image by: iofoto at ©Depositphotos.com