Approach
How an engagement runs
Assessment
A read-only scan of the shares you nominate. Nothing is moved, changed or deleted at this stage. The output is a picture of what is held: volume by location, age profile, duplication rate, and ownership where it can be established.
Most organisations find the result uncomfortable. That is normal, and it is the point.
Classification
Rules agreed with the people who own the data rather than imposed on them. This is where retention obligations, legal hold and any regulatory requirements are written down, usually for the first time.
| Category | Typical share | Disposition |
|---|---|---|
| Retain | ~10% | Kept, indexed, findable |
| Review | ~13% | Referred to an owner |
| Duplicate | ~26% | Removed, one copy kept |
| Redundant | ~52% | Disposed with an audit record |
Disposal
Nothing is deleted without a record of what it was, who authorised its removal, and under which rule. Disposal runs in stages and stays reversible until each stage is signed off.
Structure
This is the stage that decides whether any of the previous three lasts. An estate that has been cleared but is still fed by the same unstructured flow of attachments, exchanged spreadsheets and saved-just-in-case copies will look much the same again within a few years.
The work is to put rules around the point of arrival rather than the point of cleanup: what gets captured, how it is classified, where it is filed, and what retention it inherits on the way in. Where that can be automated it should be, because a filing convention that depends on people remembering it is a convention that has already failed.
A small set of policies and a scheduled report usually follows, so the next conversation is about exceptions rather than starting again.