It seems to me, a file plan is absolutely necessary for paper records.
I've always liked the "if it's *this*, then it goes *there*" approach to
paper record management. I want to know if I want a particular document,
I'll find it in a particular folder. For electronic documents, however,
the file plan or the more granular categories probably have more to do
with ease of disposition or for holding records than it has to do with
finding records. As Christian showed with his excellent 'real-world'
iTunes example, tagging is everything. It's just getting people to
understand that spending a few minutes entering a few keywords now saves
many, many hours later. Of course, using controlled language really
becomes paramount -- either that or building a huge thesaurus so that
the search engine knows that Journal Entries, JE and Jrnl Ent are all
the same thing.
But when it comes to disposing of records or holding records, it's
helpful to be able to hold all records for ABC Project which is in the
ABC Project folders and subfolders, rather than picking out particular
documents from the 5, 7 and 10 year buckets. Similarly, when Project
ABC's retention period is up, it's easier to dump the Project folder,
than to pick documents out of the buckets.
I use a somewhat hybrid "big bucket" approach -- let's say a "fewer
bucket" approach. However, our company has just a single product line,
so it's doable.
We have 7 functional areas: Accounting/Finance/Tax has 32 records
series; Acquisition and Divestitures has 6; Lending has 15; Development
(home building and marketing functions) has 20; HR has 19; Public
Company Reporting has 12. I rely more on indexing fields to locate files
within the more inclusive records series ("Project Files", "Trade
Files", etc.).
We have a total of 12 retention periods: CDS, 1 MAX, 2Y, 3Y, 4Y, 5Y, 6Y,
7Y, 8Y, 12Y, 15Y, 30Y and Perm.
- The 1 MAX period is Active use only, destroy as soon as no longer
useful, but no longer than 1 year after it's no longer used. This is
also known as our "General Retention Rule" or GRR.
- The CDS retention period varies depending on which state the
division is in. So, for example, project files in Arizona are kept for
9Y, while the same files in California are kept for 12Y because of
differences in state statutes.
The vast majority of the series fall under 6Y or 7Y, with Perm being a
close 3rd (as far as number of distinct series, not necessarily quantity
of documents. Most of them have to do with our corporate governance).
Rather than trying to teach folks what is and what is not a record,
we've taken the approach that everything is a "record." Some records
have specific retention requirements and will have specific retention
periods in the retention schedule, everything else falls under the GRR.
The whole records program has only been in effect in this company for
less than 2 years so we're still working out some of the kinks, but I
still think that this is a good approach. I'm currently working with IT
to set up SharePoint and trying to figure out the Content types and
associated metadata fields, we'll see how well it works in that
environment!
Nolene Sherman | Director of Records Management | Standard Pacific Homes
| 949-727-9360 | FAX 949-789-3379 | [log in to unmask]
-----Original Message-----
Getting back to Larry's point, and one made after his, that in huge
buckets, it might be hard, but in "large" buckets that are smaller than
"huge" but bigger than old style schedules, there could be efficiencies.
What do I mean by that? Suggestions of 100-200 buckets vs. 3 buckets on
the "huge" size and 4000 on the "tiny" size might be very doable for an
organization.
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