Hi Simon,

All true. Also, I think the up-front work - a comprehensive information audit - is often short-cut out from projects.  

Then creating a simple policy for defining when a piece of information becomes a record has to happen. SEC regulations and the company's own requirements need to be considered. The trick here is to write something that can understood, remembered and easily followed by people who don't give two-hoots what a record is. And then developing a system that makes following the rules intuitive and fool-proof.

Records Compliance by Stealth (r)(tm) Ben Birns ;)

A solid Workflow design and utilisation of Transparent Records Management are the tools I use for reaching these goals.