With more than 30 years experience in records management and more than 20 years experience in records management consulting, we've seen a lot of examples of failures and a lot of examples of successes. Describing success is easy, your goals are achieved, can be implemented, and does not cost a fortune. Failures are not so easy to describe because they fail on numerous, different boundaries. Most recent failures include electronic records because employees do not interact with a record, they interact with a document.
What this means is that any retention schedule must have several more levels of hierarchy and catch more information before. Essentially, a retention schedule must be based on a taxonomy, not a master classification plan, business classification schema, unified classification plan, or "Big Bucket." A taxonomy differs from these types of classification in that it includes more information about how we use the information. Dr. Choksy's article "8 Steps to Develop a Taxonomy" IMJ Nov/Dec 2006, describes how this works. Her article can be purchased from the ARMA Bookstore at http://www.arma.org/.
All of the information in a taxonomy will be gathered in the creation of any good retention schedule. Our difference is that we organize it and make it useful to the organization: legal, IT, the workgroup, as well as the employee. This combines knowledge management with records management. Without charging more money, we are able to create a resource that manages information as an asset rather than solely as a liability.
