What's the business case for disposition?

There's a lot in this post, and it's a bit "detail oriented."

Please stick with it though - and message me thoughts and ideas. One of the principal challenges that we have in RM is a financial one. We can't get money, and I think that's because our practice isn't directly connected to money often enough - so there may be a few posts like this in the coming months.

On the face of it, the logic for disposition is simple and obvious.

The more stuff you have, the more it costs to store.

The harder it is to find what you need.

And the more time you waste.

The challenge, is that nothing exists in a vacuum.

Take getting funding for instance, if the bucket of money were unlimited in size, everyone would get everything they need.

But it's not, so they don't - we don't.

Which brings me back to disposition, and the business case for it.

Where there is no regulatory requirement to destroy a record, the business case for doing so rests on three simple premises -

1. The marginal value obtainable from a record is now lower than the marginal cost of storing it.

2. The marginal cost of storing a document over a specified period of time is more expensive than the marginal cost of destroying it.

3. The marginal costs imposed on people trying to find a specific piece of information, will be reduced by more than the cost of disposition.

For the non-economists out there - marginal means "at the margin" - which you can just take to mean "the next" - we use marginal because it can go in either direction.

To adequately meet these premises, we have to know a number of things:

1. How much value does our organisation get from a record? Cost reduction, revenue etc.

2. How much does it cost us to store a record?

3. How much does it cost us to destroy a record? The whole cost - system, policy, procedure, labour - all of it.

4. How much does it cost people to find a specific piece of information now?

5. What is the relationship between the cost of finding, and the volume of records we are storing?

Even after we know these things, we have decisions to make because disposition isn't the only solution to these problems. For instance -

1. Do we have cheaper storage options available?

2. How is the structure of the information impacting the cost of storing and finding it?

3. How will the structure of the information impact the cost if disposing of it?

4. Is there a business case for making this structured data? (which is a whole other kettle of fish).

The point of laying all of this out is to ask the question - how often have we thought about any of it before we've bought an EDRM/ECM/DM system, implemented a retention schedule and developed a (retention focused) BCS?

I was a carpenter once, and am truly excellent with a hammer.

The trouble with being good with a hammer, is that hammers are only really good for driving in nails and putting marks on things that people consider "defects."

Generally people are paying for an outcome - not the nails, and definitely not the defects created by a stray hammer stroke - they end up costing you money.

Without a clear business case, I wonder if disposition is our hammer.