Global Retention Policy and Schedule Management

Establish information lifecycles and enable auditable programs

• Define retention periods for records, drafts and copies.
• Establish retention periods for record classes and non-record categories.
• Manage a corporate taxonomy and library of retention, privacy and discovery laws with appropriate roles and change management processes for field-level authorization.
• Enable audits by business group, country or information category, and support internal audits with convenient reports and reminders.
• Supply version history, audit controls, authorized procedures and compliance history to demonstrate program effectiveness to regulators and management.

Publish accurate, dynamic schedules

• Manage schedules, change requests and controls centrally and consistently regardless of information type. This enables global records coordinators to maintain schedules more easily.
• Conduct fast global information inventories by business, function and country, and link proper retention, data management and discovery procedures to each information repository.
• Author retention schedules that reflect business value and legal requirements.
• Publish corporate and country master schedules and group and departmental schedules. Link schedules to the master taxonomy or pre-approved country-specific exceptions.
• Update procedures and practices quickly when laws, systems or business objectives change.

Host a full, shared law library

• Catalog laws for all operating jurisdictions.
• Incorporate retention, discovery and privacy laws for more comprehensive instructions.
• Author and share governance procedures and internal protocols, identifying their specific requirements.
• Link laws and protocols to retention schedules and identify governing laws, including requirement subsections.
• Use a full jurisdictional model with support for governing regions such as the European Union (EU).

Synchronize and maintain centralized retention control

• Unify data protection and retention procedures by country, function, system and business process.
• Manage information by common taxonomy, business value and country laws.
• Define roles, privileges and authorities for program staff.
• Establish and coordinate a network of global records coordinators. Allow country or business unit leads to manage their own records, coordinators and schedules in a common system and program.
• Delegate specific responsibilities to local coordinators, including schedule development with proper approval workflows.

Improve communications across legal, IT and business staff

• Publish bulletins and other communications globally by role, country and business unit affiliation.
• Systematically alert stakeholders when laws, repositories, staffing or procedures change.
• Publish policies, training and procedures and route them to appropriate people based on role, program participation, country or business affiliation.
• Provide retention procedures and schedules for systems as soon as they are implemented.
• Use in conjunction with IBM Disposal and Governance Management for IT and IBM Atlas eDiscovery Process Management for additional information management capabilities.