Congrats! You have a file share clean up project and everyone has your back.

IT gives you full support. Cybersecurity is footing the bill. Compliance wants a mass purge. You got your business users. Even Legal wants to be involved.

So, you get everyone into the same room and start talking.

Your legal council takes the floor. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we need to ensure defensibility."

Cybersecurity jumps in "First order of business is finding PII and Sensitive Documents."

Compliance is confused. "I thought we could get rid of everything older than 7 years."

"We can't keep paying $6 million a month to Microsoft Cloud." screams your CTO. "This is about efficiency."

"Imagine the bottom line." your CFO.

Marketing and Sales wants to keep everything. HR doesn't want you anywhere near their documents, but they are in the room just in case you decide otherwise.

All is looking perfect, but your clean-up project is already doomed.

Here are 6 lies that I bump into every single day that drives me absolutely mad. Strap in, this is a hate article in two parts where I expose the lies and share the truth. I will be going over

1) If Data Governance and Information Governance will ever merge

2) The dreams of a cryptocurrency bro: BlockChain

3) Whether regulations will save our industry

4) The myth of Trash Data in Trash AI out

5) If only people cared about records management

6) Too much data is an excuse

By January 2025, the cumulative total of GDPR fines has reached approximately €5.88 billion. The fines still didn't stop META from collecting biometric data in Texas and getting penalized another $1.4 billion.

The privacy regulations were supposed to help us be safe and improve records management. It was the talk of the town in ARMA circles from 2016, and is still seen as a way to get our field the value it deserves.

Yet, they don't work.

So, how can we fix them?

There is the obvious. Tighten the regulations and make the fines actually hurt.

But my friend Ramesh K V has a better idea. A hall of shame.

Read the rest below.

It takes 4 hours a week for end users to classify their records. And they don't do it.

That leaves us with one of two choices. Hire a records manager for every 10 business users, or find a way to change our culture and supplement our work with technology.

As most of us are one many armies, our only option is to change the culture.

And change sucks.

So, how do we do it if it's the only way to drastically improve our records management?