Why I Wrote Getting Your Records House in Order
I've been in this room more times than I can count.
The conference table is covered in sticky notes. Someone pulls up a retention spreadsheet that hasn't been touched in two years. The IT director explains that "everything is on the shared drive" while Legal quietly winces. Somewhere down the hall sits a storage room full of boxes nobody has opened since the last administration.
Everyone in the room knows something is wrong. Nobody quite knows what to call it.
After thirty years of walking into rooms like that one, I call it what it is: an information governance problem. Today I'm releasing a book about how to fix it. It's called Getting Your Records House in Order.
The Gap I Kept Seeing
Large enterprises have entire departments for this. They have IG committees, Records directors, enterprise content platforms, and legal teams that have survived e-discovery more than once. They have people whose whole job is governing information.
Mid-sized organizations usually don't.
In those organizations, records responsibility gets added to someone's existing role. It lands on the compliance manager, the IT director, the paralegal, or the executive assistant who has been there longest. These are capable, dedicated people. But nobody manages records well on the side, without a framework, and without knowing where to start.
That gap is the one I've spent my career trying to close. It's the gap this book is written for.
Waiting Is Already a Decision
Most organizations tell me they'll deal with records management when things slow down. In thirty years, I have never seen things slow down.
What I have seen is the quiet math of inaction. Every day without a retention policy is a day you've decided, by default, to keep everything. Every year without an inventory adds more systems, more storage, and more records with no owner.
Then something forces the issue. A litigation hold letter arrives. An audit finds gaps. A breach exposes records you should have disposed of years ago. At that point, you're building the program under pressure, with opposing counsel or a regulator watching.
The organizations that build the foundation first have a much easier time. I wanted to give more of them a way to do that.
What the Book Covers
Getting Your Records House in Order is a plain-language guide to records management and information governance. It's written for organizations that know they need a program and aren't sure where to begin.
The eight chapters follow the order you'd actually build a program:
Your Information Is a Liability. It Doesn't Have to Be. What information chaos really costs.
Let's Get the Terms Straight. Records, documents, data, and the information lifecycle.
What Do You Actually Have? Building an honest inventory by record series.
How Long Should You Keep It? Retention schedules and defensible disposition.
Getting It on Paper. The two core policies, procedures, and training.
When Records Really Matter. Legal holds, e-discovery, and avoiding spoliation sanctions.
Technology — Tools to Help (and Traps to Avoid). Email, cloud, and AI-generated content.
Your First 90 Days. A three-phase roadmap to get started.
Along the way, you get tools you can use this quarter. There's a sample starter retention schedule and a legal hold readiness checklist. There's a five-question test for whether a software purchase is premature. There's also a quick reference to ARMA International's Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles® and a full glossary.
Who It's For
I wrote it for the people who get handed the problem:
The executive who knows the problem exists and needs to decide who owns it.
The compliance lead asked to "do something about records" with no mandate or map.
The IT leader tired of being the default owner of every information question.
The growing organization whose information practices haven't kept pace with its growth.
You don't need a records management background. You do need to see information governance as a business problem, not just an IT or legal one.
What It Isn't
This book won't hand you a finished program. No book can. Your records, regulators, systems, and risks are your own.
It also isn't a pitch for software. One of the most expensive mistakes I see is buying a records platform before a retention schedule exists. A system can support a good program. It cannot create one.
What the book gives you is the foundation: the vocabulary, the core components, and a practical sequence for your first 90 days. Progress over perfection.
Why It Matters to Me
I've held the Certified Records Manager credential from the Institute of Certified Records Managers since 1999. That standard shapes everything in this book. But the point was never the credential. The point is what good governance does for an organization. It reduces risk, saves time, and turns information from a source of anxiety into a source of confidence.
In 2025 I founded fraction-ally for the same reason I wrote this book. Senior information governance expertise shouldn't belong only to Fortune 500 companies. The book is a first step you can take on your own. fraction-ally is there when you need more than a book can give.
Great information governance doesn't happen in a quarter. But it starts in one.
Start where you are. Get the book — the digital edition is $37.95 and arrives as a PDF in your inbox. If you'd rather talk through your situation first, let's talk. No obligation — just a straight conversation about where you are and what it would take to get where you need to be.
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