Ward,

Welcome to the wonderful world of records (it depends) management. Unfortunately, as much as many of us would like to make RIM more of a science than an art, there are still plenty of grey areas in what we do. And this issue will not get any better in the future. If anything, as the lines between what is business-related and what is personal continue to blur, the debate will get worse. The planner example is probably a good one to illustrate my point. Let's say that you are a person who loves his or her Franklin Planner. Your employer got you hooked on it, but due to the current economic conditions, will no longer pay for refills. So you buy your own pages. And let's just say that your company has a policy that calendar entries are deleted from Outlook within a year of the meeting, not because it is the retention period, but because it saves space on the Exchange server (if there are calendar entries that are considered records of the company, you're
 obligated to retain them in paper or electronic form somewhere else). As a good Franklin Planner student, you put all your appointments in your planner, both work and home. You also take copious notes of work-related and personal meetings in your planner. Your To Do list is in there as is your Christmas list and various grocery lists. You keep track of your prescriptions and those of your family members.You also make some notes relative to your direct reports' performance. Is this a record of the company? And let's fiddle with this example a bit more.. you're also a local school board member for your public school district. You also take copious notes at Board meetings, in particular executive sessions and conversations that you have with the Superintendent. Do we have a public records issue?

Let's fast forward a couple of years. Your company hands you a check for $2000 and tells you to buy a computer. This will be your primary work computer, but it is yours to keep if you leave the company. If it breaks or becomes obsolete, the next one is out of your pocket. Your employer has also decided to use the enterprise editions of Gmail and Google Apps. But "in order to enable you to work more effectively", the company allows you to merge your personal Gmail account with the corporate account. Who determines what is a record and where records are maintained?

The "recordness" or "recordworthiness" attributes of information are many and varied. Much can be dependant upon an organization's policies, but another organization will claim those attributes on a basis of law or regulation.

I once had an IT person come into my office. Her question was simple: "We're imaging contracts. Can we toss the paper?" My response was "It depends," followed by about ten minutes of questions to understand how the process was set up, what was being imaged, and what the attorneys creating the contracts wanted to see. Some of the questions had to do with a determination of whether certain laws regarding retention of paper contracts would apply. Some was to elicit the user expectations and requirements, and some of it was to determine the recordworthiness of the images.

I think that many of us would like a workplace where the declaration of a records and the association of the records with the retention schedule happen automatically. Unfortunately, those things don't happen that way yet.

 Patrick Cunningham, CRM
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"Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier." 
-- Colin Powell

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