Records Management: It s Not Rocket Science

A few weeks ago, I was interviewing someone for a job in our Privacy & Compliance (P&C) group. Since records management falls under P&C in my organization, I wanted to know if this candidate had any background or knowledge of records management. His response took me completely off-guard. He said, Well, it's not rocket science. At first I was a little offended. After all, this is what I do. I'm the Corporate Records Manager for Iron Mountain! Later that night I was thinking about what he said, and he's right records management is NOT rocket science. In fact, we all practice records management every day without even thinking about it. When we get an important email, we typically don't leave it in our active mailbox, we move it somewhere where it won't get inadvertently deleted, or save it to an archive. When we get the mail at home, we open it, pull out the bills, discard the junk, and file the bank statements. We do our taxes and keep a copy for our records. We may not know the laws or regulations that are behind retaining records, but we know we have to keep them for a certain period of time because they provide evidence of something. They may be evidence of a purchase, taxes paid, bills paid, etc. Here are some examples of what we retain in our personal lives because it's important:

Bank Statements

Taxes

Receipts

Warranties

The same principles apply to business. We keep documents that are created and/or received on a daily basis that provide evidence of our organization, business functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, and internal or external transactions. These documents are all considered records.

The only difference between records we keep at home and records that we keep for business is that, for the most part, we know how long we need to keep the records at home. Bank statements can be shredded once all the transactions are cleared, taxes need to be kept for seven years, I keep receipts and warranties (for big purchases) until I no longer have the product or the warranty has expired.

Business records are a little more complicated. You may not know off the top of your head that personnel files need to be kept for eight years after someone leaves the company, or that that creepy picture of brains in a jar is considered part of the company's archive and should be retained forever! That's why all companies should have a records retention schedule that their employees can refer to and determine how long they need to keep things. The retention periods provided in most records retention schedules are intended to be as short as possible to minimize the volume of records while still complying with all legal, contractual, or operational requirements. Records should neither be kept longer than the periods stated in the schedule, nor should they be destroyed or discarded before the stated retention period expires. The bottom line is if you don't know how long to keep a business record, look it up. Better to be safe than sorry.

And the moral of my little story is: No, records management is not rocket science . It's more like common sense for business. And by the way, he didn't get the job.

LINK:	http://blog.ironmountain.com/2013/records-management-and-storage/recor...
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