Records Management Feature: Expiration Policies

re: Records Management Feature: Expiration Policies

DLV — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 07:43:43 GMT

Dear Ethan Gur-esh,

First I wish to congratulate you and your team for bringing Records Management out of the closet and into the mainstream by the effect of Microsoft joining the cause and also for making your thoughts and principles related to RIM to the passionate masses via the web blog.

In your latest posting you state - Perform an automated “action”: For many types of content, disposition can be fully automated. For example, the item can be deleted from the system without any human involvement.

I have a major problem with this concept. WHY? Because disposition requirements may change or need to be updated over time, an automated disposition process may cause legal, moral or historical implications. In my RIM world I would always, and without exception requires a manual process so that I can receive a document of what is to be disposition so I can have senior management sign off on the action. It is not my decision to disposition certain data at a certain times but a corporate one [as an RIM manager I may be delegated the authority to advise on the disposition process but I would never sign off personally due to legal implications if I made the incorrect decision]. Senior executive level and possibly the legal department need to sanction an action not the RIM system or the RIM manager.

On a second matter: The promotion of classification as a desirable process has been highlighted on several occasions in the blog postings but to date no specifics. Will you be addressing the matter soon? I vote with you in your statement - Because we believe classification is a critical component to the success of any records management system, we’ve enabled a number of other features like record filing and reporting, that help process your records or help you identify if anything is out of policy. - I would go further and state that without a Business Classification Scheme - BCS in place no and I mean NO [in the strongest terms] RIM system can be successful.

Third matter: I see no mention of ISO 15489 pars one and two in any of your blog posts. What is Microsoft’s position in the support or otherwise to the International Bible for RIM in its product offerings? ISO 15489 to my knowledge is now available in Italian, French, and German and of course English plus I understand it is being translated for Russian & Chinese. ARMA of the USA and Canada are supporters of the standard so it would be of interest that the Microsoft offerings are at least cognisant of the principles and guidelines espoused in ISO 15489.

My 2 cents worth!

Laurie Varendorff ARMA

re: Records Management Feature: Expiration Policies

Hef — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 04:06:22 GMT

I'll respond to Laurie's 1st point. In a post-Enron world legitimate disposal of records at the 1st opportunity is a way to reduce the costs and risks associated with discovery. Retaining records for other than legal purposes such as cultural or historical interest becomes an active pursuit rather than the default. Where possible, automatic disposal is essential to deal with the very large volumes of electronic documents that may occur. Unnecessary retention creates a litigative risk that most companies will avoid. Changes that affect disposal will need to be reflected in the disposal system, and a feature I would like to see is a workflow for reviewing disposal classes. There is also a metadata issue with disposal - the legislative basis of a disposal class needs to be in the metadata, to allow tracking changes in the legal environment.

Of course, organizational policies may be needed to set who approves the disposal actions when the system is implemented and maintained, but it would seem to me that automatic disposal would lead to a significant productivity gains, although my experience in government is that this would be hard to justify on an ROI basis, as disposal action on physical records tends only to be taken when it becomes a major problem due to storage overflow or a significant legal action, and is otherwise not resourced.

As an example, on government agency I worked for handled 40,000 emails per hour (Not counting emails that were spam filtered). Now, using a rough guess as to how many were records (1% seems reasonable, but it could vary) that's 400 emails per hour which should be captured as records. Assume an 8 hour day (more like 10 in that organization), 3200 a day, assuming 250 working days per year that's 800,000 per annum. I don't even want to think about listing these in anything other than an electronic form, and the sooner that volume is reduced the better, as that 800,000 becomes a rich hunting ground for lawyers during discovery, the media during Freedom of Information requests, and a tremendous burden in terms of indexing. And in all likelihood, most will never be referred to after a month or two.

During discovery records are assigned a hold - disposal should cease with the discovery order. A possibility is to stream records for disposal into 2 streams, the 1st being those that have never been accessed, and the 2nd those with some level of access. That would highlight those that are more likely to be of some significance, and perhaps should be the subject of further review. All of this is possible, provided the metadata design is decent and logs are available. When volumes are high automation is essential, otherwise we end up with organizations staffed with 5% records staff.

Cheers
Hef
pcheffNOSPAM@internode.on.net

re: Records Management Feature: Expiration Policies

recman — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 04:54:32 GMT

@ DLV:

Laurie,

Firstly, thank you for your warm congratulations on our product and our blog... it's always great for our team to hear.

Regarding your questions/feedback:

1. About "automated disposition": I completely agree that in many circumstances automated disposition isn't appropriate, and I apologize if this posting didn't adequately stress that. It's exactly for that reason that we've enabled our expiration policies to use human-centric workflow processes to manage record disposition, in addition to the automated approach. And of course, in all cases a RIM program's dispositions must always be sanctioned by the appropriate executives & legal departments.

2. Classification: We will be getting into the details of classification soon (beyond what we've already discussed with Content Types). We know that community is waiting to hear more about classification, but we've got many concepts to cover in the overall story of RIM in Office 2007 and want to adequately cover each before moving onto the next. But please stay tuned! :)

3. About ISO 15489: While we haven't mentioned it directly on this blog yet, we're very much aware of and in favor of ISO 15489. Having an ISO-ratified standard for records management practices was an important event in the discipline of records management, and we certainly took the principles & best practices of that standard into account when designing Office 2007. It's my hope that as we continue to talk about RIM in Office 2007 that it becomes evident how the functionality in our product aligns with ISO 15489. (So again, please stay tuned!)

Thanks,
- Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager

re: Records Management Feature: Expiration Policies

recman — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 05:01:07 GMT

@ Hef:

Thanks for the comment/response! I couldn't have made the case for automated disposition in a RIM program better myself. :)

- Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager

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re: Records Management Feature: Expiration Policies

Hussein Ahmad — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:14:03 GMT

after expiration, the disposition approival triggers.

what happens when i select "retain this item". would this renew the expiration policy again, so lets say if it is a year, then this will renew the item with 1 more year ?