How to win the compliance battle using 'big buckets': despite verbal skirmishing about how big retention schedule "buckets" should be, RIM professionals agree that reducing the number of records series buckets can help organizations win the battle to increase user accuracy and compliance and reduce costs and risks.

• Author: Cisco, Susan
• Position: United States. National Archives and Records Administration

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A retention schedule is a formal policy defining an organization's legal, regulatory, and business requirements for records retention and destruction. Applying the big bucket approach when developing or updating retention schedules results in significantly fewer record series or "buckets" and improves the ability of a user or an automatic classification tool to accurately and consistently classify recorded information for retention purposes.

Not everyone agrees that reducing the number of record series or buckets is a prudent approach to managing retention schedules, and lively discussions have ensued at conferences and on the records management listserv. For example, Chris Flynn's big bucket theory blog contains this passage:

Today we are looking at the 'bucket' and trying to reconcile our traditional methods with a theory that has reached fruition in an alternative discipline ... a schism that is reaching a level of maturation in our profession. In one camp [are] the records managers that hold to traditional time tested and well established practices. In the other camp there are records managers that have leapt on the IT train. They are the prophets of radical change and the canonization of their practices. This article explores the controversy around the topic of fewer, bigger retention buckets by clarifying the terminology used to discuss the topic, suggesting the optimum number of buckets in a retention schedule, and explaining how to apply the big bucket approach when developing a new schedule or revising an existing schedule. (Steps for applying the big bucket approach to new or existing retention schedules are in the sidebar article that begins on p. 32.)

The terms "information," "records" "content" and "documents" are used interchangeably throughout the article, and no attempt has been made to distinguish one from another because the definitions vary so widely by discipline, country, and culture. In the end, all of an organization's recorded information must be managed efficiently and effectively to leverage its value and minimize the risk of retaining it too long or not long enough.

Many organizations have applied controls to the management of their "official records" (records that are legally recognized as establishing some fact and retained as evidence of business transactions or decisions). However, according to Elliot Gerard's presentation at a Microsoft Office Sharepoint Conference in March, the official records of an organization may constitute as little as 5 percent of its total volume of recorded information, leaving 95 percent to be managed using traditional rules and tools.

The Big Bucket Approach

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is credited with being an early promoter of the "bigger bucket" approach for streamlining granular (usually departmental) retention schedules because the existing processes required federal agencies to commit too much effort to inventorying and scheduling routine records. Initially called "flexible scheduling," the approach provided flexibility in defining record groupings composed of multiple records series in large aggregation retention schedules. Record series that were related to the same or similar business process and were supported by the same or similar legal and business requirements were aggregated into bigger buckets.

Private sector organizations also have found it necessary to streamline their retention schedules for effective implementation of enterprise content management, e-mail archiving, and other recordkeeping systems to ease the classification burden on users, who were having difficulty selecting correctly from hundreds, or even thousands, of categories when classifying content for retention and information lifecycle purposes.

Another approach has as few as five buckets (for example, one bucket each for one year, three years, five years, 10 years, 25 years, and indefinite). The approach is being promulgated by various technology vendors, especially information lifecycle management (ILM) system vendors. ILM is a process for managing information through its lifecycle in a manner that optimizes storage and access by storing content on the most cost-effective media.

John Isaza, Esq., of the Howett Isaza Law Group LLP, observed in 2008 that:

This 'huge bucket' approach may be useful in managing data storage costs; however, it is not recommended for retention management because it does not effectively address event-driven conditional retention periods and is not granular enough to adequately address federal and state requirements for record retention. The Optimum Number of Retention Buckets

Records management and IT professionals are coalescing around 100 record series or buckets as a reasonable number of retention categories for most industries and organizations. Evidence for this conclusion includes:

* In Records Retention Procedures, Donald Skupsky, president of Information Requirements Clearinghouse, stated that even a large organization's retention schedule will contain fewer than 100 record series, and 50 to 70 may be sufficient for most organizations.

* Bill Westcoat, who is a senior architect and records manager subject matter expert for EMC Documentum, has been involved in 60 implementations of records management and electronic document management technology over a five-year period. "I would say 95 percent of them have less than 150 retention categories," Westcoat said. "One client was successful in going from 7,000...