Bruce Miller, Founder and President of www.rimtech.ca shares his perspectives on the
value of the Big Bucket approach to developing more effective and manageable
retention schedules. He observed the following: “These are all good points you
make Andrew. With this Big Bucket Approach you’re actually placing a less
granular (bigger bucket) version of the retention schedule “in front of” the
actual, detailed schedule. Suppose we have the following (3) accounting
buckets:
- Cost Accounting 4 years
-
General Accounting 5 years
-
Retail Accounting 6 years
We can replace all of them with a single bigger
bucket simply called ACCOUNTING, and set the retention period to 6 years, the
longest of the smaller buckets. The consolidation has a profoundly positive
effect on end user classification in a large EDRMS Project. Users can now
classify faster, and easier. This leads to a big increase in overall
enterprise-wide classification accuracy rate, which is crucial to the success
of any EDRMS system.
Without a doubt this calls for some rather
radical rethinking of the modern retention schedule and the practices
surrounding it. There is no question there’s a price to pay for it – some
documents will be kept longer than they need to be according to their original
(shorter) retention periods. However that small price is more than worth it for
the huge benefit of an acceptably high classification rate.”
