In theory there may be only qualitative differences among being dishonest, ignorant, or uninformed about your product and the world. In practice the outcomes for the ignorant or uniformed buyer are identical – Jazz and Blues sound the same to the tone deaf.

it is not practical to suggest that nothing ever gets deleted and I agree that there is a cost to keeping everything. Yet, that is a daunting list of stakeholders to get in a room and agree. Ultimately the question is not what do you do with things that are regulated (HR, Customer Data,etc.) That is organizationally the easy part.

It is the everything else. That endless list of memos, agenda, and things that fall outside the easily categorized. The “else” part of the “if” logic. Business value is so difficult to quantify that whether we admit it is what we are doing, people do give up and apply classifications so broad as to be meaningless and throw a dart and pick a date. Decision made. Project complete. Next.

I freely admit though – I am not out there doing this everyday anymore like the great people that commented here. I question though if I had it to do over again if I would make the same decisions.

I used to believe some decision is better than no decision in retention. I am just not sure anymore. The core of the argument here is that the traditional justifications for this position need revalidation against new technology and cost structures. If file plan and disposal schedule development practices are unchanged from five years ago then we are probably not doing it right.

1. Legal/Regulatory requirement to keep for X time
PLUS
2. Business Needs or wants to retain for X time.

It is definitely not simplistic and when developing disposal schedules you do absoluely look at history, the litigation the company has been involved in, both form the protect of itself but also from the protection of its assets and IP.

Keeping everything is not the solution and Im sorry but while the Cloud has many advantages it is not endless, there are still financial and process/efficiency costs with the keep everything position.

You also need to be mindful that in many jurisdictions around the world there are also legal requirements that “personal information is kept as long as necessary and no longer”, that also precludes endless storage in the cloud.

Retention is an area where IT, Records and Information Professionals, Risk Managers, Legal Counsel etc need to work together for a practical solution. And yes you are right in that determining value is incredibly difficult. But just because its difficult doesnt mean that you dont attempt it….