Information Technology Record Retention time best practices

[mnayle]

Dears,

i am looking for the best practice to identify the policy related to "Information Technology Record Retention time", taking into consedration the diffeent type of documents which avalible for such filed, e.g. proposals, project documents, technical documents, deployment diagrams, manuals, meeting minutes, project status, incident reports, etc...

Thanks for your help.

 

[harry]

Re: Information Technology Record Retention time

Dears,

i am looking for the best practice to identify the policy related to "Information Technology Record Retention time", taking into consedration the diffeent type of documents which avalible for such filed, e.g. proposals, project documents, technical documents, deployment diagrams, manuals, meeting minutes, project status, incident reports, etc...

Thanks for your help.

Welcome.

I hate to disappoint you but the answer is - 'it depends' and that is the truth!

Information technology or not, you can classify them as project documents which generally, is kept for 1-2 years after 'completion' of project.

Completion has a wide meaning. A project which is physically completed but not handed over due to various reasons is not completed until handed over, or until full payments are made. If guarantees are given, you need to consider the guarantee period. If it involves structures, you need a different consideration. In my place, you have a 7 years liability period for structures. If it involves taxation matters, it is a minimum of 7 years and for fear of the tax people hounding you, many people kept it for much longer - check with your management.

So, it really depends. The best people to consult for these kind of information in my country are the company secretaries - people who incorporate companies and deal with company laws.

 

[JaneB]

Re: Information Technology Record Retention time

Yes, I'd say the same as Harry. It really depends.

I often consider them in these groups:

1. Information where there is some kind of statutory/legal/contractual obligation that sets a minimum time period; for example, in Australia, one must keep financial records for a minimum of 5 years after the end of the relevant financial year; payroll records for 7 years (I think) after the last entry was made or modified
2. Information where you, as a business or organisation can decide how long; this might be kept for anything from 1 year to 2 years or more, depending on what the business decides is reasonable; for example, most clients rarely want to keep their project meeting minutes more than 2 years (but also, they don't work on projects that involve guarantees or that are likely to come back again)

Also, as Harry suggests, project 'completion' can mean anything from 'we delivered it' through 'we've stopped working on it ' through to 'put it on the shelf'.

The lawyers/company secretaries should be able to answer for type 1. For type 2, I'd make some recommendations and look for management to approve/modify. There really are no definite answers, but questions to consider include:

• Would we need to look back at this?
• Is there anything about this project that might come back to haunt us later (eg, a possible legal case, a client complaint, etc)
• Might we find this useful in future (seriously)?
• What would be the possible risk if we destroyed this after X years?
• How much storage space (physical/electronic) do we want to use?
• Why would we keep this for any longer than eg, 1 year?
• Is any of this re-usable, or not?

.

Often people keep things for no good reason at all. 'Just in case'. As someone who has had to clean up later, and consign far too many ancient and useless boxed records to dump bins some years down the track, I wish they wouldn't.