Ownership is also ambiguous when RIM belongs in different departments; if it sits under Risk in Finance, within the EXCO team or in the DMS in IT, different imperatives may be placed on the ownership, resource requirements in HR and other processes which leads to lack of accountability.

One reason to review your retention schedule is in times of transition. If the organisation is undergoing a change in strategic direction, evolution of the management team or simply responding to new technology trends or legislation then RIM and Governance should feature in the big picture process.

Action 2: When the RIM is defined together with the responsible person, unpack it in line with what adds value in their performance indicators. I once headed up Marketing in a very large IT corporate, where my job was to build a robust brand, through being extremely responsive to market conditions. It was decided in the bowels of the organisation that we needed to become ISO compliant. Not only did no one explain the purpose of ISO to me in my fast paced environment, but an old army-trained technocrat would sit in my office, weekly, expecting me to document the wrong processes in my job (gleened no doubt from a 40 year old academic textbook - pre the IT industry and B2B marketing) and the filing mechanism for selling consumables to retail customers. I fought back. It a waste of time, would have hardcoded my creativity and reduced my value in the business development process.

Best practise says that you should verify the system and the rules regularly and whenever the nature of a project or a strategy changes or new information comes to light (stakeholders or facts) the rules and results should be reviewed. There should be a Records Management line item in every project plan and SLA.

That is why robust Change Management and Adoption should be part of the process. A bland PROSCI methodology is usually lethargically stuck onto the process like a band-aid. It should be integrated into the business's strategic roll-out along with other optimisation projects.