What is best practice for deleting records?

[Megan C]

What is the widely accepted best practice for allowing or restricting deletions?  We have a blanket rule that no one but our Security Admin can delete in Prod, but have already made one exception to allow users to delete a personal filter.  We've now received a request to allow people to delete drafts of knowledge articles.  Thoughts?  We know we can make the exception, but as a new implementation we are trying to determine if we should.

[Community Alums]

I like SN's policy on this, if you are considering bulk deletion. Pretty much sums up the challenges.

ServiceNow Policy on Requests for Data Removal: Platform data relationships are extremely complex and extend

well beyond simple database table management. Enhanced table models, reference fields, business logic, workflows and customizations make it impossible to simply remove data from the "backend". ServiceNow is unable to account for the impact and such an action; even removal of seemingly innocuous records could affect platform stability, causing unexpected behavior from business logic previously known to be working without fault. ServiceNow cannot intervene in data removal unless the presence of those records are causing a business critical operation to be unusable, the presence of that data has or will cause an outage, or those records are a result of a defect/Problem.

Source: https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0717791