By Noeleen Schenk |
June 27, 2025
Discover the latest trends in workplace innovation
Information Management Roundtable at the SPS Workplace Summit
The SPS Connected Workplace Summit took place on Tuesday 24th June at Mercedes-Benz World, Surrey. Centred on the latest trends in workplace innovation, it presented an exclusive opportunity to discover the future of our working environment.
As part of the event, Metataxis Directors, Noeleen Schenk and Mark Stephenson hosted a lively round table session focussed on information management, discussing ways to holistically manage both paper and digital records.
Entitled “Information Management: Implications of Transformation,” Noeleen shares her insights from this interactive round table:
Defensible destruction of legacy records
“A lot of the discussion centred around the defensible destruction of legacy records – both paper and digital. This, for most organisations is still an exceedingly challenging issue.
The roundtable delegates also talked about the issue of securing engagement with senior stakeholders. It is not always easy to engage with them, and while legal and regulatory compliance can highlight the issue, it is also important to think about the organisational benefits dealing with legacy records can bring.
Benefits of legacy records
Working with legacy records offers a chance to identify and bring to the fore records of organisational value, and combined with other records, can support the creation of new knowledge and insights. With more and more companies investing in AI, cleaning up their records and data, ensuring that they are within retention, well-organised and well-governed, will provide greater confidence in the results of AI generated searches and outputs.
We went on to discuss the meaning of “transformation” and how information and records management activities could be described as transformational as they impact on organisation’s ways of working. It can positively impact on the organisation’s culture.
Deploying successful destruction programmes
The roundtable members then moved on to talk through the governance of destruction – and ways to obtain senior stakeholder approval for destruction programmes. Successful engagement includes taking a risk-based approach to authorisations, especially when the legacy records are poorly catalogued and organised, making identification of the owners and content virtually impossible.
One delegate shared their approach of taking a two-strand approach. Strand one was dealing with the current records, putting in place controls which ensured the retention and destruction was built into current systems. Essentially, ensuring today’s records will not become tomorrow’s legacy issue. The second strand focussed on the legacy records, and taking a risk based, pragmatic approach to solution design.
We also talked about how “defensible destruction” is contingent on a well-designed, easily understood Retention Schedule that can be easily and confidently applied by both systems and people.
Insightful, inspirational and innovative
SPS is one of our key partners in the records and information management space – and it was fantastic to be invited to be part of the SPS Connected Workplace summit. The day was packed with insightful presentations, inspirational speakers and industry innovations.
We hope you enjoyed the event as much as we did.”
