5.3.5. Records Management
💡 First Principle: Some content isn't just data an organization happens to have — it's an official business record that regulations require be kept for a specific period and disposed of through a defined, defensible process, so records management provides that formal lifecycle: declaring content a record, applying a retention schedule, and running disposition review before deletion or archival.
Disposition review is a key step: rather than content simply auto-deleting silently when its retention period ends, a designated reviewer confirms the content is actually safe to dispose of (or needs to be extended) — creating an auditable, defensible decision rather than an automatic, unreviewed deletion.
⚠️ Exam Trap: Records management is specifically for content that must be formally treated as an official, regulated record with a defensible disposition process — not every piece of retained content needs to go through full records management.
Reflection Question: Why might an organization want a human disposition review step before permanently deleting a record, rather than letting it auto-delete the moment its retention period technically expires?
