Interest in Records Management Rises, Email Still Badly Managed

By David Roe (@druadh20) Oct 14, 2010

Recently, we took a look at records management in SharePoint in which we cited research from AIIM that showed spending on records management is set for a major increase. That research has now been published and shows that while records management is a major concern for enterprises, the real bad boy in records management is email management.

The first thing that stands out is that recent events like the BP oil spill, the banking crisis and high profile government email leaks have focused executive-level attention on records management.

The second thing that strikes is that one third of organizations have no records management policy at all. Of the two thirds that do, many are struggling to define a policy on emails — whether they should be kept, destroyed or saved.

Spending On RM Rises

Based on 650 responses to questionnaires sent to business people not involved in records management in August, the findings are published in the report E-Discovery and ERM: How is records management performing in the new spotlight?

There were a lot of positives to be taken from the responses, not least of which is that the priority given to records management over the past two year has increased in 80% of companies, with a corresponding planned increase in spending on records management software in over half those organizations.

In nearly half the cases, enterprises said that they had implemented records management across organizational units, with 17% saying they had applied across the entire enterprise.

For enterprises that are concerned about the costs involved, leaving aside the potential cost savings by remaining compliant, 31% of respondents say a lack of complete electronic information has been an issue — 17% say that they achieved a return on investment within two years.

Content and Record Retention

However, it is the negatives that are surprising, especially given the escalating costs of e-Discovery, and the growing number of increasingly stringent regulations that enterprises now have to comply with.

In general, retention policies are quite good around office documents, but considerably less so around newer Enterprise 2.0 technologies or social media content. Could it be that, as we found earlier on this year, many companies are having difficulties understanding what records are?

The evidence would seem to suggest that they are. While 86% of enterprises include office documents amongst their electronic records, transactional records such as invoices or bank statements have only been included by 64% of companies, while only 12% are including Enterprise 2.0 and social media content.

Email Mis-Management

This is particularly telling when looking at policies around email, even at the level of where emails should be stored. For those that do store emails, 18% are storing them on Exchange archives, but 9% are still keeping them on local drives. A further 5% print and file emails, while 16% have absolutely no policy at all.