[00:00:01] Speaker A: Diving deeper into back file characterization.
Hello. Thank you for joining us. This is what counts. A podcast created by Trailblazer Consulting. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries. And we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. We share our experience solving information management challenges, like creating and implementing a records retention schedule, creating an asset data hierarchy, or helping with email management.
This is Lee. In this episode, Maura and I will talk about the specifics behind a back file characterization project.
Maura, I covered the introduction in our last episode. I promised our audience that you would dive deeper into this. So I'm glad you're here. Appreciate you coming back. I'm. Safe travels and so forth. If you would. Why don't you dive a little deeper?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Well, thanks for hanging, for holding down the fort while I was stuck in various airports a couple weeks ago.
So it's been. It's been a good time getting. Trying to get home, backfile. This is just a natural occurrence in every company because no matter how well intentioned you are at the beginning to always file things as soon as you get them to get rid of extraneous paper right away and delete drafts or whatever that you don't need, life gets in the way, and it just doesn't happen. I recently cleaned out one of our old file rooms here at Trailblazer and looked at the buildup of paper that we've had in the past ten years. It wasn't that bad. We are a records management company, and we do try and keep things tight. But I still had five boxes that ended up being paper that could be destroyed, that we could have gotten rid of last year. So I still feel like this is a worthwhile effort because every company runs into this problem. Even when you're small and you're doing things mostly electronic and you. And you have the rules in place, you magnify that by. It's 10,000 employees across the country, and people get in a hurry, and they have deadlines, and they have the next project to move on to, and it just gets out of control very quickly. So I know Lee talked. You talked last time about kind of the idea of office moves, triggering back file cleanup and the fact that you have sometimes 20,000, 50,000, hundreds of thousands of boxes in off site storage. And I know you and I saw, in one case, 500,000 boxes in off site storage, and that was for a company that was 75 years old, maybe. Um, so not even that long.
And, in fact, that was a media company. Where not everything was in paper, but still they had a lot. So how do we approach this? We've done this a few different times for companies in healthcare, in media, in oil and gas. And it's the same approach every time you look at, you're not going to be able to go through every box. It's too big, there's too many. Nobody has the patience for it. Your offsite storage company is really not set up for you to come out and sit there for weeks and send an army of temps to do a detailed inventory.
You probably don't have great detailed box list available for you to look back at your office, but you do have something, because not everybody is authorized to send things to offsite storage.
There has to be a process of how they pack things, what boxes are acceptable to pack, how do they label it, and what information do you have to tell the offsite storage company about the box? And typically that is stored. That information ends up being put onto a transmittal form. So the first place we look when we start looking for back file characterization is where are the transmittal forms? And in some companies, those are actually spreadsheets where they've been stored electronically. In some cases, it is a physical form and people have handwritten on it, but they're all in a folder somewhere. So we start with that. And on the transmittal form, the key things that we look for are what was the department or the function that sent this off site? So did it come from sales? Did it come from accounting? Did it come from legal? Did it come from some kind of operational or a front office sort of activity?
If there's. And usually you can get that. Usually the transmittal forms, say at least a department, they probably have a date, because the storage company cares about the date. They want to know when to start charging you and also when the pickup was. Cause they're gonna charge you for the pickup. They may have charged you for the boxes, and they're going to charge you starting that day for the storage. So you usually know, at the very minimum, you know the functional area, the department that created these records, and you know the date they sent them off site.
So if that's all you have, you take that information and you go to the retention schedule and you say, okay, what are the record categories that the sales department is responsible for? Or that they are the custodians, the keepers of the records. For what records does the sales department create?
They create these three types of records. They have order forms, they have prospect forms, and they have marketing materials or something. Okay, look at those three and which one has the longest retention? What are the triggers for those three? And think about that. Your order form is going to be triggered by the day that you take the order. And it probably, that's the start of it and it probably closes out from being active on the day that the order is delivered and paid for. So if you can look at the dates of these records and all you know right now is their sales records. So, okay, maybe if they're all order forms this date that they sent them off site, everything would have been paid for by then. So let's start with that. And we have a trigger that says it's been paid for and we have the ten year retention after that. So that's one thing. Look at the other two categories, sales has. They have sort of contact prospect records. Those are usually a shorter timeframe. They don't have as clear a trigger. It's kind of people we might come back and call again probably a three year life because people's and responsibilities change in three years. You need to keep your contacts up to date so that that order form one is probably the longer one. Third one was the marketing materials. Now this might vary a little bit depending on your industry because if you're selling greeting cards, the marketing materials are going to change pretty quickly by the season or something else, but they don't carry a lot of weight or liability with them. There's not a regulatory reason for your, for you as a company to keep marketing materials to prove what you told the public about those greeting cards.
But if you are an industry that is selling a product to consumers that has some, that carries with it some safety requirements, then those marketing materials actually might have a longer life. And they may not be the purview of the sales department at that point because they have this other purpose, which is your company is communicating the safety and efficacy of your product. So if you're a pharmaceutical company, marketing materials are the life of product because you have to be able to prove that you provided all the appropriate warnings to the people who bought it.
So you're going to have to look at your retention schedule and decide what's the likelihood. All I know about these boxes is they were sent off site by the sales department and they're more than ten years old. Do I think there's marketing materials in there that might have this longer retention requirement or not? And you need to look at your company. You might need to talk to your records champions because this is part of your overall information governance program and you've built up a network of people, talk to people and say, what do you think? Do these off site storage boxes that say sales, are they probably order forms, orders and fulfillment, or are they probably, or do you think there's a chance there's marketing in there that has this liability? So that's, this is where the. The analysis part kind of the science, the art of this comes in, as opposed to the science.
But you do this analysis and you write it down, document it, your decision process, you get your appropriate sign offs and you have some level of confidence in it. If the only two pieces of information that you had is sales department and a date, your level of confidence is kind of low and you're going to go with a longer hold period before you destroy it because your confidence is low. On the other hand, if you compare your transmittal forms to what the offsite storage company has in their inventory, and between those two, somewhere you actually have box list that are box level inventories of all the folders or documents that are in your boxes, then your confidence level goes up because you've looked at not just it's the sales department and they sent it off site, but actually you've looked at a box list that says order fulfillment and receipts, 1982 to 1987 or 1988 to 1993.
So you have a much higher level of confidence that, yeah, these are order forms. There's no marketing material in there, and they're more than ten years old. We feel very confident that we can destroy this. And as long as you documented all that and you have the appropriate sign offs in accordance with your destruction procedures, you don't want to create something new here.
You save that and go ahead and destroy it because your confidence level is higher. So that's the general approach. It's very concrete. When you're talking about boxes and off site storage. You have transmittal forms. You might have the storage company's inventory because they know what they're charging you for. And maybe if you're lucky, you have actual box list. You can apply that same concept to the electronic world, but it magnifies, it just multiplies, it grows, it blows up because as many boxes, and you might not even be able to imagine what 200,000 boxes in offset storage looks like.
But think about that in electronic form because you might have a share drive that's been around for 15 years, and every time somebody gets into a new department, they just create a new file structure because they can't figure the old one out. But nobody ever gets rid of the old stuff. It's still out there. So I think last time, Lee, you mentioned Trailblazer has in the past built its own little Excel based inventory tool. There are many other similar inventory tools on the market and they're basically kind of a crawler tool. They read the properties of, first the folder structure. When was this top level folder created? What was it named? What department created it? What user groups had access to it? What permission groups or active directory groups had access to the folder? When did the subfolders get created? When was the last time they were accessed? All that property data is readily available and these crawler tools are, some are better than others, but they all basically can go pull that data and put it into a spreadsheet format that you can look at, you can filter, you can slice and dice it to come up with that same concept that you did on the paper side of, okay, I think this whole directory structure was created by our environmental team when we were building our new campus.
And I know looking at our retention schedule that construction records and environmental records tend to have a very long life. So do I want to spend some more time figuring out what's in here and digging deeper to get rid of some things or not? And that's going to be a judgment call that you're going to make with construction, with environmental. On the other hand, I've got this whole set of folders over here that are purely administrative.
They're like internal communications, employee welfare kind of things like planning the holiday party or coming up with new giveaways for people, new t shirts, new bags, new water bottles. You got to get a new water bottle every year with a new logo on it. So that stuff that's going to have a really short life, I can with high confidence say, let's wipe that out.
Otherwise I'm looking at, okay, I've got contract management. Well, our contract management retention is based on when was that contract closed out? When was the final payment or the fulfillment of the final obligation. So if I look at the contract admin world, I can see when were the contracts put in here? When were they last modified, when were they last updated? And make some decisions off of that. And your confidence level goes up and down by different groups of your, different parts of your back file, electronic storage based on what you know. But basically you're pulling together all this sort of circumstantial evidence, like the evidence of the circumstances that created these records to help you understand what's your risk if you destroy this now versus what's your cost if you keep it and you use your retention schedule to guide the value and your assessment of. Okay, again, I think these are sales documents. I think they're from 15 years ago. We could probably safely get rid of these. We don't have a lot of disputes in sales. That's one of the other factors you might look at is, do I have a heavy litigation profile in my company or not? And if I do, where is it?
Often in companies, your litigation profile is in employee litigation. Your HR records might have, you might have better information about them and they're tied to the employees. So you can look and see, are these records about active employees or are they about former employees? If they're about former employees, how long ago did those employees leave? Because there's statutes of limitations. So use all of these pieces of data to help you decide how to get rid of big chunks of information. Either get rid of it now or mark it and say, my plan is I found out all these things about it and I'm going to keep these for x more years and then destroy them unless something comes up, like a legal hold. But now they're under control. Now they're not an uncontrolled back file anymore. Even though you didn't clean them up right away, you've tagged them and you know what you're going to do with them. And again, document it. Get the sign offs, pull your records network and your champion network in to get their buy in on it.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: So that was good. That was a lot. You were on a roll and I'm shaking my head over here going, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I. I think one other piece you can do is some selective sampling as well, not only from a box perspective, you could pull back x amount of boxes and say, yeah, I'm more confident now that these are the records in this grouping, but also from an electronic perspective, if you just have folder after folder after folder, you could start sampling some of that information and add to the metadata information that you already collected. The gist is you're making some logical assumptions. You're then proving those assumptions with all the statistics that you can possibly muster using the retention schedule and everything else that's at your disposal. Then you're getting to the confidence level. I am confident that this is what it is and this is how old it is. Now you take into consideration your organization's risk tolerance. That's exactly what you said. Right. And you make a decision that you're going to document with your executive group to do the next step. It's keep or it's destroy. Or I'm confident that this is what it is so we can get rid of stuff this way.
[00:17:12] Speaker B: Exactly.
The challenge here is not that these are hard concepts, it's that the volume is overwhelming. So you can't go look at every box and you can't open every folder. It's never going to happen.
Which means it just is going to get worse because you're going to look at it and go, oh, no, it's like the closet. You don't want to clean out and then stuff, people just keep shoving stuff in the closet.
But it's more important and it's much riskier and costly. So this approach gives you some control, and that's what you're looking for. And your documentation and your decision making process with your champions, with the people who are responsible for the functions that these records support and your executive team. That was a good ad, Lee.
That approves the process.
That's defensible and that's what you're looking for. I also liked your statistical sampling, and I'm going to save that for a bonus episode coming soon.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: Okay, excellent. If you have any questions, please send us an email at
[email protected] or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com. Thank you for listening and please tune into our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake who created our music.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Thanks everyone. See you next time.
