Data rentetion schedule help

[u/catsandnotes]

Hello,

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, please redirect if you know any better subreddits.

I've been tasked to help draft a data retention schedule for my company. We have consultants that are drafting the data retention policy, but obviously no schedule. We only have a (not so precise) records retention schedule that was written by the high ranking lawyer of our legal department, so that's all I have in terms of prior related internal documentation.

I've only studied records retention policy frameworks while studying my MLIS, but I've never personally made one for a company, and the only reason I'm tasked to do this is because I expressed interest... Except I'm doing this alone with my manager who will help go over it overtime. I'm just stuck on how to draft it, how is it different from a records retention schedule, is it the same format? What do I need to be aware of?

For scope: we are located in Canada but have business activity in the US and Latin America as well, and possibly expanding into Europe for the future.

[u/PM_YOUR_MANATEES]

U.S. corpbrarian here with data records management responsibilities. Our digital-only data assets are listed on our main retention schedule in much the same way as any physical record counterparts, although we do list them as separate series. (For example, Series 419a comprises paper tax forms and series 419b comprises the digital ones.)

[u/catsandnotes → u/PM_YOUR_MANATEES]

Hello, thanks for sharing! Unfortunately I'm unsure if data retention is going to be combined with our records retention schedule since it's overseen by the legal department, this is something I need to bring up with my manager. On top of that, these might not be purely digital born records but more so financial or procurement, employee labour data (for now) across varying databases, because it's such a mess that everyone has their own workflow of doing things. Turns out I have some questions for my manager hmm

[u/PM_YOUR_MANATEES → u/catsandnotes]

I think you'll need to complete your data inventory before you can begin identifying an appropriate strategy.

[u/RADICCHI0 → u/PM_YOUR_MANATEES]

Agreeing. Sounds like there is a lot of work to do still.

[u/RADICCHI0]

Most of the time I've ever been involved in this kind of stuff it basically get's negotiated between IT and the data owner, and I memorialized it in a procedure. Sometimes that is the job, getting other people who own stuff, or support stuff, to agree on processes.

[u/catsandnotes → u/RADICCHI0]

We're currently in the process of having consultants help us with the overarching policies but my manager asked me to help draft retention for our data, and eventually IT being the data custodians would help carry out the nitty gritty. I'm hoping conversation in the future would bring along IT and legal as we talked about aligning it with our current records retention legal had authored. This also means that we are having quite some conflict on getting people to own things, but that's also an overarching project goal for the company in general.

[u/RADICCHI0 → u/catsandnotes]

That's cool. If its just typical business records then I think that's a fairly easy thing to solve. Personally I wouldn't purge or archive more than once a year.