The flip side of retention: Strategies for cleaning up physical records

With a focus on data privacy and compliance, central repositories and enhanced control are important to organizations that want to protect themselves from breaches and financial penalties. Over-retained or unorganized records lead to more cost, less value, and greater risk.

Related link: What does a risk-aware organization look like? Start by treating risk as a shared responsibility.

Solving old problems with new technology

The application of technology, automation, and AI has made records cleanup more attainable than ever before. Today’s tools can help remove not only the time and cost associated with manual cleanup but also the subjectivity of disposition decision-making that can put your organization at risk.

Applying technological solutions to previously manual processes can help you find a logical, systematic starting point in your cleanup efforts. Where are you using the most resources, time, labor, and money? Do you need to identify, sort, scan, or destroy the majority of your records? Discovery and decision-making made with an objective approach through technology can help guide you through a more streamlined and defensible process.

When you’re ready to create a disposition strategy and launch a cleanup project

Before you begin the process of physical records cleanup—or if you’ve already started but aren’t making the progress you hoped—creating a strategy that secures stakeholder buy-in, considers potential actions, and prioritizes those actions is important. Here are three areas to consider when tackling records cleanup:

1. Assign accountability: Get executive buy-in and a sponsor
2. Determine potential actions: Digitize, securely destroy, retain in paper format until eligible for destruction, or archive
3. Prioritize your plan of action:
   • Low-hanging fruit – Accurate metadata and indices to enable defensible decision-making
   • High-risk records – Contain sensitive or private information and are a potential target for litigation or audits (HR, patient records)
   • Greatest value – Candidates for digitization for use in data mining/AI/ML (loans, patient records, etc.)

When you’re ready to launch a records cleanup project, it’s crucial to follow a clear plan. RIM leaders recommend a few important steps. First, retain paper documents only until they’re no longer valuable or eligible for destruction, and meticulously document all actions taken to identify and perform destructibility. Securely destroy any records or boxes that can be disposed of immediately. Finally, determining which documents should be digitized and made easily accessible is essential to streamline processes and improve information retrieval.

Best practices for defensible disposition

Whether your organization is still swimming in paper or has been on a cleanup journey for many years, finding the right automation tools, engaging the right people in your organization, making objective decisions, and tracking progress are key to success.

Watch the full webinar

Interested in learning more about this topic? Visit Iron Mountain’s 2024 Education Series to watch the on-demand recording of The flip side of retention: Disposition and to register for upcoming webinars.