Maybe a better question to ask would be:

"What percentage of my organization revenue will it cost if we fail to have
a sufficient Records Management Program, or don't have one at all?"

or

"How much risk is my organization willing to accept for failing to spend
whatever it costs to appropriately manage their information assets?"

The most prominent example in the press over the past year seems to be one
ion the Energy/Utilities sector, so that might help form a basis for
comparison.  I think th last estimate I heard was an expectation of cost
exceeding $200million, not including what they're spending to build the
infrastructure... and this is for failing to maintain a program they once
had.

Every organization has to determine th escope and magnitude of the effort
to manage they information assets and evaluate the cost benefit of doing
so, and it takes a performing functional review and asset analysis to begin
the process.

You need to know:
- what you have (and how much of it there is)
- who needs access to what portions of it and how they will gain access
- how long things need to be retained
- what your infrastructure is and if you have the ability to adequately
store, manage and share the information without making upgrades
- the skill and technological ability levels of your staff and if training
will be required prior to implementation projected volume growth of your
information, your regulatory landscape
- if any of your information has special protection requirements (privacy,
confidential, trade secrets)
- which records are vital to your organization and what are the needs for
protection
- how much will a disaster protection/recovery plan cost
- will electronic records and backups be considered part of records
management
- what about web sites, social media, email, voicemail

For starters... the list is actually much longer.

Without gaining this type of knowledge up front, it's difficult if not
impossible to determine the level of effort to establish a records
management program.  You might want a centralized function, a distributed
function or a mix (centralized with staff matrixed to other parts of the
organization).  The costs may be borne institutionally/organizationally and
provided at no direct cost to others as an administrative or overhead cost,
or there may be a desire to 'charge back' for services based on a fee
schedule.  And there may be issues such as contract storage costs for
records, constructing or outfitting an area to store records, a need for
vaulting or fire protected storage for vital records, etc.

So yeah... id really DOES DEPEND...

Larry
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On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Dana Yanaway <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> great question, I would be interested in what others have to say as well.
>
> While I don't have any current accurate numbers, the following back of the
> envelope calculus might prove insightful. In a former life I was the RM at
> a large law firm. I don't have any current figures about it now it has been
> so long since I was there but I imagine the numbers would be (within a
> factor of 10) something like the following. Bear in mind that this is very
> rough ball park type numbers
>
>
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > How much percent of revenue do most large corporations spend on records
> > management?  Thanks in advance for any information you can share!
>


-- 
*Lawrence J. Medina
Danville, CA
RIM Professional since 1972*

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