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To Purge Or Not To Purge Your Data
Lucas123 writes "The average company pays from $1 million to $3 million per terabyte of data during legal e-discovery. The average employee generates 10GB of data per year at a cost of $5 per gigabyte to back it up — so a 5,000-worker company will pay out $1.25 million for five years of storage. So while you need to pay attention to retaining data for business and legal requirements, experts say you also need to be keeping less, according to a story on Computerworld. The problem is, most organizations hang on to more data than they need, for much longer than they should. 'Many people would prefer to throw technology at the problem than address it at a business level by making changes in policies and processes.'"
Users aren't meant to be making those decisions, the Records Management department should be... that is if you even have one! If you leave everything up to the users, you WILL have a cluster fuck of records.
I work in Records Management at a large company with many different divisions in diverse fields. RM is completely left up to us. We manage well over 10,000 boxes and there's only 3 of us. We alone determine when something is to be destroyed (but require authorization from dept heads to be shredded), how long it's kept, etc.
Disclaimer: We work mainly with paper records, but the exact same principles apply to electronic records.
You need a retention schedule. Look at your national, state/provincial and municipal laws to determine the minimum legally required length of time each TYPE of record is to be kept. Employee time cards are different from pension plans, sales invoices and legal files. It's not *always* 7 years either. Some are less, some are more, some are permanent. Also, you don't have to shred when the law says it's time if there's a valid business reason to keep that set of records. I mean, let's get this straight. You don't HAVE TO shred at all, but you're digging yourself a deep hole if you do... "You can get in just as much trouble by keeping records too long as you can by destroying them too quickly." - Dr. Mark Langemo
If this was all left up to individuals, they would just keep everything. I've seen what this is like, and it's pathetic, maddening and counter productive. Things must be properly named and catalogued down to the file level when put in storage, or you will NEVER find ANYTHING without an exhaustive search EVERY time. It might be alright when it's on your desk or in your local filing area and you know what's where, but when you archive it, you can't assume the guy looking for your file you need knows anything about it. We need explicit details or else we can't help you. At my company we require everyone to fill out a nice sheet detailing the contents of their box, the type of records, dates (most remember dates above all else), sender's name, dept, etc.
We are by no means a perfect operation here, but we're far better than 90% of other companies out there.
There is a series of excellent seminars done by Dr. Mark Langemo (sorry no links) to teach you how to deal with records. Also check out ARMA International if you're looking to get in touch with other Records Managers in your area. They have local chapters all over the place.
To summarize, if your company doesn't have a Records Manager, HIRE ONE NOW and give him/her the resources to get your records under control! Check out ARMA, they have jobs posted on their site. There are also many companies out there that will help you clean up your stuff and get you started on the right track.