Risk Forces

Document-related risks can come from many different directions. Some of the primary risk forces include:

The risk in your enterprise is driven by a number of complex factors. Over 7.5 billion Office documents are created annually and 80% of those are stored on hard drives and scattered shared drives. Add to this the continuing problem of user adoption of new tools and you have an abundance of information risk inside your organization. Your enterprise has risk inherent in the way information proliferates; additional risk is produced by your employees, clients, regulatory bodies, and legal departments.

Most high-risk documents sit on end users’ hard drives, shared drives, and thumb drives. But most employees simply don’t care all that much about document compliance. That’s a dangerous combination unless you can find a way to bring all the documents your employees create into compliance with your document retention policies—without fail and without exception.

The companies you do business with and the contracts you sign often dictate how you should dispose of sensitive documents. Your inability to meet these contractual obligations can create obvious and unacceptable liabilities for your business.

Government regulations require most businesses to have written document retention policies in place, create a concrete plan for educating their employees, and find ways to enforce those policies across the whole organization. In too many cases, uncontrolled documents on the desktop lead directly to non-compliance with these regulations.

Your legal department’s job is to protect your business against legal risks and liabilities—even at the expense of business productivity. So you have to manage how legal issues affect the organization and work product of your employees.