Many organizations suffer from a culture of employees ‘saving everything forever,’ leading to the over-retention of vast amounts of electronic data. These ingrained employee habits not only pose privacy, security, and compliance risks, but also inflate storage costs and increase eDiscovery pain.
Defining what constitutes a record is one of the most important, and often most challenging, elements of an effective records management or broader information governance program. We examine how organizations can develop a clear, defensible, and practical definition of a record.
For companies that want to start or upgrade their records management or information governance program, determining what to do and the costs associated with this can be challenging. We cover all the pieces you need to be able to fund an effective strategy.
With the right approach, executing your records policy and schedule is not only doable, but it also brings new value to the organization.
Everywhere we turn, someone is using a new tool to communicate, and we’re faced with a dizzying array of chats, encrypted messages, video recordings, transcripts from AI tools, prompts and outputs created by generative AI, and a host of other odds and ends. The sheer volume and variety of these formats have made information governance and data retention a far more complicated endeavor than ever before.
A data inventory is critical to managing your information, and if you do business with Minnesotans, it’s now required under Minnesota’s new consumer privacy law, the MNCDPA. A Personal Data Inventory is focused on just the personal information your organization collects, uses, maintains, and shares with third parties, as well as the processes surrounding that activity. As we frequently say to clients, on webinars, and to anyone who will stand still long enough to hear us: “How can you protect it if you don’t know it exists?”
Hoarding isn’t a malicious act. In today’s tech-driven workplace, saving data is nearly effortless. Whether it’s a quick email backup to a personal folder or keeping old project files “just in case,” employees often don’t stop to think about the consequences. Trying to fix the problem with threats or policy reminders rarely works. What’s needed is a thoughtful approach to change management, one that tackles habits and attitudes alongside technical controls.
When organizations come to us looking to implement or update a data retention policy, it’s usually driven by privacy compliance issues. With growing enforcement of global and domestic privacy laws, organizations are under pressure to minimize how long they keep personal information. That’s a good reason to act, but when we dig in, the organization begins to see that privacy isn’t the only consideration, and in many cases, it’s not the most complex.
