5 Worst Mistakes when Cleaning Up File Shares

Not Starting With Your Data

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.

No one in the room knows what their documents look like. They didn't even bother going through their own drive.

The discussion is purely theoretical. Every word is a hearsay. And it continues until the records team throws in the towel. No more clean up project. Let's just do business as usual.

Don't get me wrong, the more heads the merrier. You need all of these people for a successful project. But many get stuck in the details without ever looking at a single document.

Get these people into a room. Your goal for the first meeting is getting as many people to look at their own documents.

For the second meeting, get them roaming their departmental file-shares.

Third meeting is where you have the big picture discussion. File Share clean up is a puzzle without the picture on the box. You need to find the pieces first, then talk about the "big picture".

Keep It by Default

"Why do we have to delete documents?" asks Head of Marketing. "Can't we just move them to cheaper storage?"

"Yes! Our target lists are eternal. People never change fields. We need all of those sales notes." Your Sales VP firmly believes that his team does research before hitting the phones. You can find him roaming the halls wondering why his emails always go to the spam folder.

"Employees rarely leave our company. And when they do, there is always a formal HR complaint and a case against us. We really can't get rid of anything."

HR, oh HR.

Even your technology vendor agrees. Their file share clean up tool asks for permission to delete.

What to do? What to do?

You nudge. Slightly. That's all you need. You talk with your vendor and ask them to change the prompt. Instead of asking for permission, the tool says "These 200 documents will be deleted. Please write a reason to keep them if you want to hang onto them."

Sounds too simple? It works. It works everywhere, even in organ donations.

Obsessing Over Defensibility

Legal Council pulls you to the corner.

"We get sued 12,000 times a year. This clean up project has to be airtight. We can't delete a single document unless it is defensible. You hear me? Not a single document!"

Your vendor loves the idea. "We have a new OCR technology and a transcription tool on the works. If you use them both, you can go through all of your data at the blink of an eye."

He sends you a quote for $24,000 per TB processed. You find the legal council and show him the

quote.

"Looks too expensive. Let's wait until there is a cheaper alternative."

Cleaning up is all about finding the sweet balance between defensibility and speed. If your legal team is running the show, you will be off balance. Make sure you have strong support from IT and CyberSecurity teams. That's how you reel legal in.

Check this article to see how you can get that support.

I Can Do It All

No, you can't. On average, it takes 4 hours per week for end users to classify their records/documents properly. So, they usually don't bother with classification.

Your end users don't understand your job. They usually say something like "At the end of the day, isn't that why you were hired? Shouldn't the record manager handle everything? What can be so hard about finding some records?"

Unless you have an army of records managers -roughly 1 for every 10 employee for upkeep, 1 for every 4 employee to catch up- your clean-up project will fail.

You need technology to help. And you need department heads to buy in.

Start with convincing your IG teams. IT, CyberSecurity, Compliance and Legal, in that order. (Detailed out in 7 Tips for File Share CleanUp)

Then bring the project to department heads of business users. Assign them as the main custodians of data. Since the project is already under way, they can't wiggle out of this work.

It Won't Take That Long

3 years into your clean-up, your CTO asks you why their cloud costs doubled. "We are paying $12 million a month now. I thought your clean-up was supposed to fix that."

Average clean up takes 2+ years. If you want to do it quick and dirty, it won't work. File shares are like German roaches. You can't get rid of them with Raid and a vacuum cleaner. You need to bomb the house every 2 weeks until they are gone, and then keep paying your exterminator for years to come. Or the roaches return.

So, plan for a long term project. Your goal isn't to delete, but to ensure automated records declaration and ROT deletion. Else, you will end up with a file share infestation.

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