Separating retention management and records management

Every now and then I get a bit ranty about things like this.

Recently, I ran an executive engagement masterclass for RIMPA (we're about to re-run it, please get in touch with me via LinkedIn if you're interested - (Linkedin - Karl Melrose).

In session 2, I introduced the idea of value traps.

Value traps are things that seem like a good idea, but aren't.

The reason it's important to understand value traps, is that when you're dealing with an executive (or anyone else), you have to remember that in order to go forward, you have to first stop going backwards.

Value traps make you go backwards.

Think about that annoying person that you avoid in the hallways because they consistently talk to you about things you're not interested in.

They're falling into a value trap - every time they talk to you, they make you less likely to want to talk to them.

And eventually they just don't get a chance to talk to you because you actively avoid them.

Retention management is a value trap in almost every organisation.

There is ample evidence of this.

If you doubt it, consider how often you've been able to get digital disposition done.

If you are getting it done - I applaud you, but about 98% of the industry isn't (I plucked that figure out of the air - but it's definitely in the ballpark).

One of the biggest challenges that records management has, is that it's a very poor listener.

So it's not hearing the signal that the organisation sends about retention management that says "we don't care about this!"

The biggest challenge that records management has right now, is that it is unreasonably welded to dogma.

So much so, that practice has not changed for most people in 25 years or more.

A period during which the cost of storage is less than 0.1% of what it was, and the volume of creation is 100x what it was.

And those are the two things that drive organisations to consider managing any resource - the cost of it, and how intensively it's used.

Yet find a program that doesn't have retention management as a central focus.

Which makes absolutely no sense - retention management exists to reduce the cost of storage.

And when storage was $5/month per box, the way we did retention management made economic sense.

Now storage costs 30c/TB/month - so by the time we've sat down in the chair to run a disposition report, we've already spent the cost of a couple of TB.

Consider then, just how much it takes to get a disposition program in place the way we like to run them.

And think about how many millenia of storage costs we've spent before we've even gone to market for the system that could run a disposition process.

So it's a value trap - because everyone that we're going to meet to ask for money knows that there's no business case that's ever going to justify the amount of money that we're asking for based on the costs of storage.

So they frankly start to think of us as a bit simple, uncaring, and out of touch with the world and the state of budgets everywhere.

Because what kind of person comes to them when companies are making layoffs left right and centre to ask for the equivalent of many people's salaries to ask for hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars (many people's salaries) to solve a problem that IT are telling them they'll solve for 1% of the same cost?

So talking about retention management destroys our value in the organisation.

The business case isn't the only reason.

The main reason is actually that we've got a whole organisation full of people with really important things to do, and we're nattering on at them about destroying their work - which they all feel like they might need in the future, and given it costs next to nothing to keep it, they can't work out why you're wasting their time.

Inevitably, someone reading this is going to comment that retention management makes things easier to find, but it doesn't, and never did.

Cataloging and description make things easier to find.

If you don't catalog something and describe it properly, you could destroy your whole archive and still not find it - because that's the nature of findability.

Personally, I think that if we took every dollar that we've spent over the last 20 years on trying to destroy things and build systems that could destroy things, and spent it on titling, records management would not be in the mess its in.

Because titling is a value driver.

It's also something that you can beat people over the head with - but in a friendly way.

Every single time they can't find something "so, how did you title it?"

Then you can ask them how they would have titled it if they were applying the titling conventions for their business unit.

Once you've gone off and performed your feat of magic to find their missing thing, you can send them an email and say "just type the way it should have been titled into the search bar."

When it pops up almost instantly, you aren't going to have to have an argument about titling with them ever again - and that can spread, quickly.

And then you can continue on and make records in your organisation about solving a problem that people actually care deeply about - findability.

Throughout this blog, there's an underlying point.

Focusing on retention management is a value trap.

We should be OK with this, because we should recognise that retention management is just one tool.

It solves a problem.

If we don't have that problem, we don't need to use the tool.

But we don't think like this.

Because we've stopped listening to our organisations.

And we've stopped considering records as a set of tools to solve specific problems.

It's become more than that.

It's become dogma.

And so its dying.

Because dogmatic things die.

Pragmatic things grow and change and thrive.

Darwin had it right - it's not the strongest that survive, but the most adaptible.

We're just not adapting.

Here's how we can start, lets remind ourselves that retention management is a tool of records management, and if our organisations don't want it enough to fund it independently, and turn up to the governance meetings, and take it seriously - we don't have to have it in our programs.

It's a tool.

Not all of records management.

And records management has plenty to offer without that tool.

PS. For everyone saying "yeah but, privacy" "yeah but, security" - write the briefing paper, cost the program. If they'll fund it independently, turn up to the governance meetings and take it seriously - do it! Otherwise, don't solve their problem without getting paid for it, it devalues us if they don't know they're paying for it - that’s a value trap.