I respectfully disagree with Steve here - what I noted earlier in the thread
was a different philosophical approach to how records series might be
organized. I think you still retain and delete per policy, but the policy
doesn't require the organization to make a distinction between e.g.
72-month, 75-month, and 78 month retention periods. If the 78-month period
becomes the next longer period, the 72-month records are kept 6 months
longer than required and the 75-month 3 months longer. I am also
distinguishing between classification used to retrieve relevant records (and
other information) and the retention period assigned. If you choose to have
a detailed hierarchy for your users, fine, but know that a significant
percentage will be mis-classified no matter how slick the interface and no
matter how usable it appears to the RM professional because users ain't RM
professionals.
The assertion that doing so is a copout or ascribable to laziness is just
flat-out wrong. It's at least as defensible as a 5,000-category schedule
which is unusable to all but a small handful of information
architecture/library science specialists, and the majority of which have a
small handful of records within them. Or as defensible as the same but with
an additional middleware layer to hide all but the most applicable 20-80
categories from a user. And note that I have seen the latter used as well,
but it's not as easy as it appears to set that up.
Show me the organization that has as high a percentage of email and other
electronic records classified, and classified correctly, using the
5,000-category approach as they do paper. And before someone trots out the
usual response that it's the content, not the media, and that email is just
the envelope, you're right but it's immaterial to the thread at hand. Your
users are not creating 100+ paper documents/day each which then have to be
determined to be records or not and then classified into those 5,000
categories. They *are* sending/receiving 100+ emails a day, plus Word docs,
and IMs, and PDFs, and e-faxes, and scanned images, etc. all of which have
to be declared (or not) and classified.
Cheers,
Jesse Wilkins
[log in to unmask]
-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Steven Whitaker
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 10:58 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [RM] RAINdrip: SNIA and the IT Community has an epiphany!!!
I believe in organizing records series broadly, for retention policy
purposes, and for retaining/deleting/purging purposes. I do not believe
in "categories" of records, per se.
I definitely DO NOT believe in fitting records into retention
categories; 1 year; 3 years; 5 years; permanent, etc. Defeats the
purpose of retaining and deleting/purging per policy; it is a copout; it
is not necessary. You can almost hear somebody say "OK, we are not good
at RIM, we do not have expertise, we are lazy, let's just do it this
way."
I am a purist; don't wear the spurs unless you have something to ride!
Best regards, Steve
Steven D. Whitaker, CRM
Records Systems Manager; City of Reno
>>> [log in to unmask] 4/26/2007 1:40 PM >>>
I'm not sure that the very broad categories (personnel, equipment
history, etc.)
<snip>
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