Todd,

Be very careful about sticking your head in the sand. If IT perceives a
cost savings opportunity, the project will move forward, with or
without your input. Remember, you are a subject matter expert. Your job
is to ensure that records are being maintained and that they are
authentic and trustworthy -- and available (that reminds me to convert
my old Word 3.0 documents over the holidays).

If IT wants to move in that direction, well, more power to them. What
you have to do is provide them with requirements to ensure that the
records are retained in accordance with your retention schedule and are
available through their lifetime. This is their project and their
responsibility to cost justify. But be very careful about becoming a
speed bump. You want to be supportive, but ensure that you have
realistic and rational requirequirements for them.

A lot of IT people are confusing records retention with storage. They
see the cost of storage continuing to drop in the IT world and assume
that they should be able to keep everything forever, because that is
far cheaper than actually having to do something hard like classifying
those documents to record series and figuring out how to ensure
deletion. My mantra is, "Storage is cheap; management is expensive."
E-discovery on stuff that should have been tossed years ago is pretty
darn wasteful as well.

Now, if they are dumb enough to want to make legacy paper records
electronic, they are fools and frauds. (There are more politically
correct ways of stating this.) Don't let them go down that path. You
may be paying your commercial records center a chunk of change, but
imaging a bunch of old paper records will be horrifyingly expensive and
likely never recovered during their lifetime (unless you have very long
retention periods and the records are very active). I can point to a
box of paper and tell someone that I can store that box for around $2 a
year. That same box will cost in the hundreds of dollars to prep, scan,
and index. (So lets say you can image the entire box for $100 -- how
many years of storage does that buy?)

When you say that a revision of your retention schedules will cut
storage in half, I guess I would tend to raise an eyebrow. That tells
me that either your retention schedules were previously grossly
miscalculated or some folks got seriously (and possibly overly)
agressive in setting new retention periods. So is that simply his
"belief" (based upon no facts) or his direction to you to "make it so"?
Running metrics in your business is critical and one metric you want to
have is one that shows the aging of records in storage. It is a simple
number that answers the question, "What is the average lifespan of a
box in storage?" This is a measure of time from box accession to
expected disposition date. In most organizations, I would expect that
number to be something less than 6 years, although YMMV. That helps you
calculate the total cost of storage over the life of the average box.
You take your total records center bill, divide by the number of boxes
and multiply by the average lifespan. You can then manage to those
metrics because they become unit measures and not gross measures.
Clearly, variables can act upon these numbers (high retrievals due to
litigation or audit, an accession of unmanaged boxes from a merger,
etc.). And clearly, there is an absolute bottom to those numbers. You
can't reduce your retention period to zero across the board. But it
will help show that you are managing records storage and disposing of
records as quickly as legally possible.

Interesting that a company heavily invested in making file cabinets
(ok, you really make office furnishings systems now) is looking to do
away with them internally... That shouldn't be rationale for
maintaining paper, but customers will wonder if they don't see you
using your own products...



Patrick Cunningham, CRM
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"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

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