Big Buckets – The Future of Retention Scheduling?

For records managers there are three certainties in life; death, taxes and the inevitability that some of our customers may find retention schedules too long, too complicated and just too difficult. The result? Non compliance with the records retention policy (and consequently all of the usual records related costs and risks). What if it were possible to convert the number of items on your retention schedule list from say 100 to just 5 simple ‘buckets’? Would the retention decision process start getting easier for the customer and therefore the records manager?

Big Bucket theory is about consolidating all of your existing categories. To illustrate, try this exercise: You will need a retention schedule, 5 plastic buckets, a marker pen and a pair of scissors. First, print out your retention schedule and with the scissors cut out each different item on the list. Keep all of the loose bits of paper together. Then, with the marker pen label each bucket with a retention period that suits your organisation, e.g. 3 years, 5 years, 6 years, 10 years, 30 years etc. Take each piece of paper that you have cut out and put it into an appropriate bucket (if the match isn’t exact put it into the next highest time period). At the end of the exercise you have hopefully managed to consolidate all of your 100 items into 5 Buckets. Congratulations! All you have to do now is rewrite your retention schedule and explain it to your customers.

However, there may be a catch. Do fewer and deeper buckets necessarily mean easier retention decisions? How will these buckets cope with multiple event driven retention dates? Should you keep the records for the longest possible time? How will this then impact exposure to risk through excessive retention and what will this do to storage and data maintenance costs? What happens if there is a legal hold on a particular set of records? - will you need to keep everything ‘just in case’? With broader categorisation comes broader functions - what about the loss of granularity or structure to how we traditionally manage records? Is it more complicated than what we have now? Should we be suspicious that the idea seems to have come from the record storage and IT sectors and not records management practitioners?

Obviously Big Buckets is no panacea, even taking into account the fact that my illustration is deliberately simplistic, but it is evidence of some necessary evolution within records management practice. It is an acknowledgement that there is a need to simplify the retention process both for the sake of our customers (who we must acknowledge are the people actually in control of information) and in order for records retention to be workable for increasingly complex business applications and also for new desktop technologies like Microsoft SharePoint.

I believe that records professionals responsible for developing a retention schedule should have Big Buckets at the back (or even front) of their minds.

Making things easier for the ‘customer’ is crucial. Any reduction in the number of choices will be welcomed by the records system user. Therefore consolidation should be taken as far as legal and practical restraints allow.

The Big Bucket approach may have most value in helping our customers manage lower value administrative records, duplicates, copies and other ‘non’records. These may easily constitute 80% of the problem, so by putting these low risk low value records into buckets we could be making it easier to manage the stuff that is actually of value to the organisation.

The Big Buckets approach should be applied carefully with attention paid to the specific legal, regulatory and organisational environment of the organisation. It should also be applied with the primary objective of simplifying the interface between the customer and records management procedures in order to achieve greater compliance. Clumsy application of the Big Buckets approach may turn an opportunity for simplification into a can of worms.

This is just an introduction to Big Buckets but there is growing debate on the issue available in publications and online. I can recommend several articles collected together in the ARMA International Information Management Journal Supplement, Hot Topic, Trimming your Bucket List, An Approach for Increasing Retention Compliance, September 2008, http://www.gimmal.com/Publications/Pages/TrimmingYourBucketList.aspx. Also of note is the Iron Mountain White Paper, Streamlining Retention Schedules : The Benefits of “Big Buckets”, http://www.ironmountain.com/digital/erecords/eRecordsStrategy-wp.pdf