When someone physically hoards items, their bad habits create a “mountain of stuff” that becomes very visible over time. Typically, a breaking point arrives when the problem becomes so overwhelming that people eventually must deal with it. Hoarding can go on for years before someone finally says “Enough! We must do something about it.”
The same thing happens with electronic information—but the problem is less noticeable because the hoarding does not turn into a physical “mountain of stuff.” You might think, “What’s the problem? I’ve got plenty of space to store my data. What does it matter how many files we store, or how we store them?”
In a blog post last year, we talked about a few problems resulting from electronic hoarding that add risk to your city:
While a city may acknowledge an issue with record hoarding, they may wonder where to begin, how to find the time, and how to approach the decluttering process. Consider these hoarding tips and apply them to your document management system to help your city go from cluttered to decluttered.
Each hoarding situation is different. You need to assess your current situation. Ask yourself:
Once you answer those questions to the best of your ability, you need to come up with a plan to fix any problems revealed. That plan should include:
If needed, IT professionals and business analysts can help you with the trickier aspects of your document management plan.
Hoarders often grow disheartened when they look at their entire pile of clutter. It can overwhelm and discourage them from even starting. It looks impossible to wade through everything, like facing a mountain. That’s why personal organization professionals suggest never tackling everything in one day. Instead, chip away at your stuff in bite-sized chunks.
Maybe you can focus first on one department. Once you get that department done, you will have learned a lot and can apply those lessons to another department. The important thing is to get started somewhere and take one step at a time.
Once you delve into your plan, you want to think hard about how you organize documents. A document management system will help greatly by centralizing documents in one place. That means no more searching though cabinets, on people’s computers, or through shared folders on servers that may or may not contain the documents.
However, you don’t just want to dump documents in the new central location, which would be like a hoarder throwing all their stuff into the living room. It’s there, but not very findable!
Two tools within a document management system can help you organize:
As a city, you’ve got one of the best excuses to not hoard: state records retention schedules. These policies, if adopted, tell you how long you must keep records. You don’t need to keep them past a certain date. So get rid of them!
If you are accustomed to keeping records indefinitely, you may feel trepidation about beginning such a purge. However, you increase storage costs and liability by holding onto expired records. Purge them. Once purged, you can look at future documents through the lens of these questions:
For reference, we’ve provided a few records retention schedules for states where cities we serve are located.
While a city may enthusiastically embrace document management for electronic information, paper may feel like a different, unique challenge. Your strategy for paper will parallel your strategy with electronic information but require a few different steps.
Are you a city record hoarder? Reach out to us today to get started with your decluttering.
Original Date: 10/2/2019