Records management, risk and cricket.

WG Grace makes everything relevant so he does.

W G Grace once said some very fine words about doing the obvious thing no matter what the circumstances are, in essence bat first, no matter what, if you can. 

‘When you win the toss – bat. If you are in doubt, think about it, then bat. If you have very big doubts, consult a colleague – then bat.’ W G Grace.

There are other things in life which one should consider doing if one gets the chance as the payoff outweighs the opportunity cost/risk by such a huge amount that it’s a complete no-brainer. Buy the flowers, pre book the parking, do the dishes, shred the documents etc. Simple stuff.

It turns out the US legal system agrees with me. Halliburton has just admitted shredding some potentially vital evidence about the Deepwater Horizon accident and received the maximum fine. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/business/halliburton-pleads-guilty-to-destroying-evidence-after-gulf-spill.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

$200,000.00, that’s right, a multi-billion dollar case, with potentially unlimited liability flying around as yet unearthed and the fine for destroying some damning documentation is around 1hrs worth of Halliburton’s annual profit. 

If you are a hard pressed executive facing possible extinction of your organisation what decision are you going to make? Keep or shred? $5 billion or $200 thousand? I bet your finger is getting real itchy on the delete button just about now.

So why doesn’t this happen more often? It’s a complex emotional and risk assessment equation but it boils down to three primary factors.

1.       Most people are basically honest, it’s bizarre but most records keepers store documentation for the best of reasons, the want to keep a proper record of what they did.

2.       Most people massively over-estimate the amount of risk mitigation documentation can provide for them personally, the ACL/CYA* equation, and massively under-estimate the inherent risk and costs of information assets to their organisation. This is why people hold tens of thousands of emails to protect themselves which costs their organisation a bomb to store, manage and process.

3.       Most people don’t know how to delete records properly, they rightly fear that if the delete one file “evidence of the evidence” will remain. In the average organisation every document will exist around twenty times and the average email will have about thirty duplicates. This means your properly run business processes are over storing information and your more shady activities are storing so much information you can’t hide it properly.

This is why it’s important to actually think about records retention at an organisational level and why it’s important to educate people as to what records and information are to them and to their organisation. Information is incredibly easy to keep badly. It’s incredibly difficult to keep information well. If Halliburton had kept information well then things may have been different, on every level. As it stands they have potentially opened the door to hideous legal liabilities and the emotional whims of a jury, even if the Justice department has only fined them for a mis-demeanour.

* for those without a PhD in three letter acronyms, it's Arse Covering List and  Cover Your Ass, both well known technical terms in records management, well they are around here anyway.